New England Bygones 



BY 



E. H. A R R 

(ELLEX il. KOJ.I.IXrf.) 
•I 



NEW EDITION, ENLARGED AND ILLUSTRATED. 



INTRODUCTION BY GAIL HAMILTON. 



piiiLADELrniA : 

J. B. L I P P I N C^ T T - c>c C' 0. 

1883. 



\i0M 9 1882 



Copyright, 1882, by J. B. Lippiscott <i Co. 



TO THE MEMORY OF 

MY ELDEST DAUGHTER, MARION, 

WHO DEARLY LOVED NATURE, 
AND TO 

MY SON PHILIP, 

WHO WILL, I TRUST, IN THIS RESPECT RESEMBLE HER, 
THIS BOOK 

IS TENDERLY DEDICATED. 




This book is published with no thought of an audience. It 
tells of real scenes, and of people who were actors in them ; but 
the life it deals with is so very simple that it can hardly satisfy 
the exacting appetite of the reading public. 

It is permitted to go into print especially for three children, 
with hope that their curiosity and affections may be stimulated 
bv it towards those ancestors from whom they have gotten much 
of the good which is in them, and that from it they may turn 
with desire and appreciation to sources of what have been to 
me abundant and enduring riches. 

Very delightful have been these reminiscences, taking me back 
to bygone days and much good company ; reframing delicious 
pictures which have kept their color through forty years. 

The children will read the book, because they will be partial. 



6 PREFACE. 

Some old-time country livers, caught by its title, may run over 
its pages, recognize familiar things, and be quickened by them 
into pleasant memories. 

All the more flattering will be this increase of readers, because 
I shall know that the hearts of such have been enriched by their 
sweet experiences of rural life. 

E. H. A. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS, 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



ILLUSTRATIONS TESIGNED AND ENGRAVED UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF MISS EMILY SARTAIN. 



THE ORCHARD ON THE HILL 

(Frontispiece) J AS. D. SMILLIE 



ENGRAVER. 



FEED. JUENGLING 



PREFACE. 

HEADING 



W. M. DUNK 



INTRODUCTION. 

PORTRAIT OF ELLEN H. 

ROLLINS 

HEADING W. M. DUNK . . 

THE EARLY HOME . . . . r. B. schell . . 

THE LATER HOME .... J. pennell . . 

READY FOR THE GLEANER . MARY K. TROTTER 



W. B. CLOSSON .... 13 

L. FABER 13 

J. W. LAUDERBACH . . 19 

LETTIE R. WILLOUGHBY . 29 

L. FABER 34 



ETCHINGS. 

ON THE APPLE-BOUGH . . will H. LOW . . G. P. WILLIAMS 

FARMER M W. T. SMEDLEY . . F. FRENCH 

THE VILLAGE SMITHY . . A. B. frost . . . A. J. WHITNEY 

SQUIRE S AUG. DAGGY . . . G. P. WILLIAMS 



35 
39 
43 

48 



CONTENTS, WITH 





ARTIST. 


ENGRAVER. 


PAGE 


E FARM. 








GRANDFATHERS LANE 


. F. B. SCHELL . . 


E. HEINEMANN . . 


. 49 


THE OLD WELL 


. R. SWAIN GIFFORD 


W. MILLER .... 


. 52 


GOING TO PASTURE 


. LEON MORAN . . 


G. P. WILLIAMS . . 


. 55 


THE PASTURE BARS . 


. WM. SARTAIN . . 


FRED. JUENGLING 


. 57 


THE VANGUARD PINE 


. F. E. LUMMIS . . 


H. M. SNYDER . . . 


. 61 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 

HEADING W. M. DUNK . . 

IN THE KITCHEN . . . . T. HOVENDEN . . 

THE BACK-LOG . . . MARY K. TROTTER 

SPINNING PERCY MORAN 

FROM THE WINDOW . . . w. c. BAUER . . 
CORNER CUPBOARD TREAS- 
URES MARY K. TROTTER 



H 


M SNYDER . . 


. 62 


G. 


P. WILLIAMS 


64 


L. 


FABER . . . 


. 67 


W 


B. CLOSSON . . 


. 74 


J. 


E. SHARP . . 


. 76 


L. 


FABER . . . 


. 77 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 

APPROACHING SPRING . . H. bolton jones . 
A SPRING-TIME CLUSTER . ALICE barber 
THE CLASSICAL STORE- 
KEEPER T. HOVENDEN . . 

THE BROOK H. bolton jones . 

THE COMING STORM . . . H. R. poore . . 

AT NIGHTFALL MARY K. trotter 

THE VISIT. 

HEADING MARY K. trotter 

YELLOW LILIES .... MARY H. IREDELL 

BETSY A5I0NG THE ALDERS H. R. POORE . . 

SALLY'S LUGGAGE . . . W. M. DUNK . . 

HAYMAKER'S LUNCHEON . W. M. DUNK . . 

GOING HOME h. B. m'cARTER . 

LITTLE BENNY. 

HEADING w. M. DUNK . . 

GRANDFATHER AND LIT- 
TLE BENNY HOWARD PYLE 

SWEET - SMELLING BLOS- 
SOMS MARY H. IREDELL 

•OF SUCH IS THE KING- 
DOM OF HEAVEN" . . . MARY K. TROTTER 



A. J. WHITNEY ... 78 

LETTIE R. WILLOUGHBY . 83 



H. WOLF 
J. FILMER . 
W.M. MILLER 
L. FABER 



86 
90 
93 
95 



L. FABER . . . 


. 96 


L. FABER .... 


. 97 


A. J. WHITNEY . . 


. 100 


L. FABER .... 


. 103 


L. FABER .... 


. 109 


EDITH COOPER . . , 


. Ill 



L. FABER 112 

WM. MILLER .... 114 

F. FAUST 117 

L. FABER 120 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



ARTIST. 

THE BURIAL-PLACE. 

HEADING w. M. DUNK . . 

GRANDFATHERS BURIAL- 
PLACE W. M. DUNK 

THE OLD GRAVEYARD . . THOS. MORAN . . 

IN MEMORIAM W. DUNK . . . 

HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 

HEADING MARY K. TROTTER 

HANNAH AND JONATHAN . W. T. SMEDLEY 

HANNAH'S FLOWERS . . MARY H. IREDELL 

THE STRAYED LAMB . . H. R. POORE . . 



ENGR.WER. 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 

HEADING W. M. DUNK . . 

SUNRISE H. BOLTON JONES . 

HULDAH W. T. SMEDLEY 

BAKING DAY MARY K. trotter 

NEIGHBORS. 

HEADING W. M. DUNK . . 

THE MEETING-HOUSE STKI'S A. B. frost . . 

THE TAILORESSES . . . . c. G. bush . . . 

THE MINISTER S WIFE . . Alice barber . . 



E. CLEMENT . . 
J. W. LAUDERBACH 
L. FABER . . . 



121 
122 

127 
132 



J. DALZIEL 133 

A. HAYMAN .... 134 

L. FABER 137 

J. S. FOY 141 

H. M. SNYDER .... 142 

F. S. KING 143 

F. FRENCH 149 

L. FABER 151 



H. M. SNYDER . 
G. P. WILLIAMS 
EDITH COOPER 
G. P. WILLIAMS 



152 

155 
159 
164 



SUNDAY. 

SUNDAY MORNING AT THE 

MILL L. m'cutcheon 

WEEDS AT THE DOOR . . F. E. lummis . 

ON THE WAY TO CHURCH . EMILY PHILLIPS 

THE BELOVED PASTOR . . Howard pyle 

SILENCE T. DEWING . . 



OLD TREES. 

HEADING .... . . M. n. IREDELL . 

OLD TREES G. H. SMILLIE . . 

THE WOODLAND BEYOND 

THE ORCHARD . . . . j. appleton brown 

THE SAGGING BRIDGE . . f. E. lummis . . 



G. T. ANDREW .... 165 

L. FABER 167 

EDITH COOPER .... 169 

F. FRENCH 173 

L. FABER 177 

L. FABER 178 

FRED. JUENGLING . . . 182 



.1. W. LAUDERBACH 
EDITH COOPER 



187 
190 



10 CONTENTS, WITH LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 

HEADING W. M. DUNK . . 

RIDING BEHIND . . . . R. B. BIRCH 

AT RECESS R. B. BIRCH . . 

OLD FRIENDS MARY K. trotter 



ENGRAVER. 

H. M. SNYDER 
A. HAYMAN 
G. T. ANDREW 
L. FABER 



PAGE 

191 
193 

199 
204 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 

HEADING J. PENNELL 

ARRIVAL OF THE MAIL . H. R. poore 

THE COUNTRY STORE . . A. B. FROST 

THE LIGHTS ARf] OUT . . J. pennell 



J. DALZIEL 205 

G. P. WILLIAMS . . . 209 

F. FRENCH 217 

J. Vf. LAUDERBACH . . 220 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 

HEADING 

THE HUSKING-PARTY 
IN THE SITTING-ROOM 
SKELETON TREES . . 



J. PENNELL . . . 
A. B. FROST . 
MARY K. TROTTER 
R. SWAIN GIFFORD 



221 

E. CLEMENT .... 223 

H. M. SNYDER .... 227 

W. iriLLER 229 



WINTER PLEASURES. 

THE FIRST SNOW . . 
A NEIGHBORLY VISIT 
THE SPELLING-BEE . 
CHEWING THE CUD . 
FINIS ' 



F. B. SCHELL . . 
A. B. FROST . . . 
A. B. FROST . . . 
HELBN HOVENDEN 
MARY K. TROTTER 



P. GEYER . . 
FRED. JUENGLING 
J. P. DAVIS . . 
L. FABER . . 
H. M. SNYDER . 



230 
235 
238 
241 
243 




NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 




This illustrated edition of New England Bygones is love's 
sorrowful effort to embellish a grave. 

The author of the book was, in her own personality, far more 
remarkable than any work of her hands ; yet, in seeking to 
per})etuate her memory and to diifuse the fragrance of her life 
after the gates of heaven have shut us out from her presence, 
nothing but her own work seems to us in any measure adequate. 

Ellen Chapman Hobbs was born in Wakefield, New Hamp- 
shire, April 30, 1831, and died in Philadelphia May 29, 1881. 

No person had a better right than she to speak of New 
Eno-land, for her blood and beinsi; came to her throuarh all the 
English generations that have sprung from New England soil. 
Maurice Hobbs, her paternal ancestor, was born in England in 
1615, and w^ent thence to Hampton about 1640. His Hampton 
farm has ever since remained in the possession of his family, 



14 INTROD UCTION. 

and the elin-ti'cc wliieii lii^s own hands phuited, still, in its 
giant age, slu'lters his homestead and gives play-ground and 
resting-place to children of his name and lineage. 

Mrs. Rollins's paternal grandmother was Sarah Hilton, a de- 
scendant of one of the three families which first settled in New 
Hampshire in 1623. 

()\\ lier mother's side, Mrs. Eollins was descended from Edward 
('hapman, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, who came from the north- 
east of England, from near Hull in Yorkshire, about 1640, — - 
certainly before 1642. Ipswich was at that time a sort of Castle 
Garden, and emigiiints landing there from old Iitswich in Ena:- 
land s})read over Rowley, Hampton, and all the region round- 
about. So it came to pass in the fulness of time that old 
Maurice Hol:)bs, leaving his home headland of Lowestoft Ness, 
crossed the wild, wide sea and got himself born again under the 
shadows of Green Mountain, in the pleasant village of Effing- 
ham, New Hampshire, in the person of Josiah Hilton Hobbs. 
And six years later, old Edward Chapman, following him from 
tlie Humber, and sailing along the mouth of Ipswich Piiver and 
past the Salisbury marshes, reappeared inland over against Effing- 
ham, in Parsonsfield, Maine, in the person of little Rhoda Chap- 
man : and the two, Josiah and Rhoda, growing into comely 
youth's estate, and falling profoundly in love with each other, 
married and set up their family roof-tree in Wakefield, just 
below Effingham, where they lived in all prosperity — with some 
sharp family sorrow but with great family happiness — till Mr. 
Hobbs's death. 



INTIiOD UCTIOX. 15 

Here Ellen was born. Her father was a lawyer, highly edu- 
cated and prominent in his profession ; a man of marked ability, 
of unusual brilliancy, with the tem|)erament of genius largely 
transmitted to his daugiiter. Her grandparents on both sides 
were farmers, and it was at their homes, especially at the Effing- 
ham farm, that she shared in full measure the rural life whose 
memory lingered through all her affer-years, and mellowed finally 
into the short and swift yet infinitely tender and restful bene- 
diction of her books. 

Wakefield itself was a small, secluded New Hampshire village. 
Its social range was narrow, as needs must l)e in those mountain 
hamlets wdrither railroad and telegraph had not yet penetrated. 
How" deep and fruitful it was in all that gives richness and 
color to life, let the following pages attest. In her father's house 
Ellen learned to place a high, if possible an exaggerated, estimate 
on intellectual culture and scholarly attainments. Her father, 
fond and proud of his children, exacted from them prompt, 
logical mental activity, and Ellen responded with a vigor and 
intelligence, in childish proportion equal to his own. In the 
village, and in her grandparents' homes, she saw and formed a 
part of a simpler life, as healthful and sensiljle, but shaped by 
the emergencies of a severer late and a more primitive observance 
of nature. It is impossible to add anything to the vividness of 
her own descriptions of her child-life, — the austere yet lofty 
and pathetic forms Viy which it was surrounded, the picturesque, 
wild, and romantic scenery in whidi it was set, and which she 
loved with an ever-increasing intensity. Her delicate perception 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

caufii;lit, her tenacious memory held, and her exquisite skill re- 
produced those early impressions with the minuteness and lidelity 
of the photograph, with the idealism and the immortality of art. 
The " Little Benny" of the following pages died before his sister 
Ellen was eight years old, but their mother, still living, sorrow- 
ful yet always rejoicing, bears witness to the faithfulness, in 
every ascertainable detail, of all his sweet, brief story. 

Fortunate in her birth, Ellen was equally fortunate in her 
schools. At the excellent village academy — that institution so 
characteristic of New England, the outgrowth of her needs and 
the conservator of her power — Ellen was the pride of her father, 
the admiration of her teachers, the soul of thoroughness and 
truth. Thence she was sent, after a single term at Bradford, 
to the lamous old Mary Lyon Seminary at Ipswich, Massa- 
chusetts, where she completed her school education under the 
care and personal tuition of Bev. John Bhelps Cowles and Mrs. 
Eunice Caldwell Cowles. These loved and venerated teachers 
still live, and long may the pen lie idle that must one day trace 
their noble lineaments through the mists of memory. Not often 
is it given to such a mind as Ellen's to come under. the tender 
training of two such minds as theirs,— minds differing as widely 
from each other as one star dilfereth from another star in glory, 
Init always two stars, brilliant, high, shining only with a more 
serene and soft, but not less splendid lustre, as they 

" Mount to their zenitli, to melt into heaven ; 
Xo waning of fire, no quenching of ray, 
But riwing, still rising, when passing away." 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

Eager to learn, with a strong natural love of literature, un- 
affectedly reverent of great thoughts, perhaps too contemptuous 
of small things, Ellen swept through her lessons like a devouring 
flame. There was for her no such word as task. Study was 
her enthusiasm. Recitation was its indulgence. Her teacher 
was the priest who fed the sacred fire. Yet she shared the 
innocent follies of girlhood, anathematized late that had made 
her not beautiful, — at least in her own eyes, — and after comical 
and unrelenting analysis of her personal shortcomings, found 
merry refuge, by heaven knows what roundabout feminine rea- 
soning, in the apparently inconsequent fact that at any rate her 
ieet were smaller ihan her hands ! It seems incredible that such 
a creature of air and fire should, even in her immaturest days, 
have had any quarrel with a body which, after all, served her 
passing well. Slender, delicate, animated, with a certain abrupt 
grace and an indescribable spiritueUe archness suggestive of an 
all-pervading lambent vitality, I think no one ever looked into 
her speaking face or listened to her low, rich voice to miss any- 
thing of beauty or to feel anything but sympathetic admiration. 

For a few months after leaving school she occupied herself 
with teaching, — a part of the time in the same school in which 
she had studied, — long enough to fix the knowledge she had 
gained and to strengthen and mobilize it by practical application 
to human nature ; long enough to promise entire and distin- 
guished success had she chosen to devote herself to that influ- 
ential, arduous, and exacting occupation. But late had allotted 
to her other work. 



18 IXTIiOD UCTIOK. 

Among Irt lather's most intimate friends m Wakefield were 
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel G. Eollins. Their son, Edward Ashton, 
was a few vears older than Ellen, and the two made mud-pies 
together till he had neai'ly reached the august age of seven 
years. Then his father moved away to the village of Great 
Falls, and her father moved into the house he had vacated. But 
the ftimily friendship continued. When Ellen journeyed home 
from Bradford it was at Mr. llollins's house that she tarried by 
the wav. WTien Ashton Piollins had been graduated at Dart- 
mouth, it was in AVakefield, under " Squire Hobbs," that he 
prosecuted the study of the law, and while he studied law with 
the father naturally enough he studied love with the daughter ; 
until, in the house in which he was born and in which her girl- 
hood was passed, the tw^o little playmates stood up and were 
married to each other, and fared forth into the great world to 
seek their fortune together. 

I sup})Ose she married honestly, believing herself to be heartily 
in love with her husband ; yet, in the light of the love that 
srew afterwards, the strong absorbing affection that was as much 
as comprehensive and as constant a necessity of her life as the 
air and-the sunshine, and which filled her and held her till death 
loosened every grasp, — if even death loosened that, — this early 
love seems but a feeljle, girlish preference, hardly more than 
acquiescence born of habit, scarcely worth accounting of. Yet, 
perhaps, it had to l)e there for a beginning. 

Mr. Piollins still lives, and of him I must sav next to nothing. 
If he dies in mv dav, I will u'ive him such a settinu'-out as shall 



INTRODUCTION. 



19 




make ' ' ^ 

him glow 

even in his grave, 

and while he lives it must be said that 
Ellen's marriage proved to be so extraordinary, 
it so shaped and sheltered, fortified and devel- 
oped her life, that to leave it out is simply to 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

say nothing. In any niarriage the overwhehning chances were 
that she would be wretched, the only saving grace being that 
she would not be wretched long. That her actual marriage 
promised well could not have been rationally affirmed. The 
youth was healthy, manly, buoyant, full of humor. The maiden 
was fragile, nervous, intense. So much appeared on the surface, 
and for all that appeared on the surface they might quickly 
have perished of mutual impatience and disgust. What did not 
a})])ear on the surfaceVas the deep, abiding, inexhaustible adapta- 
bility of each to the other. It was time alone which showed 
tliat fate, for once, was wise and kind. A woman of peculiar and 
rarely delicate mould was consigned to a man who not only loved 
her, Ijut knew how to cherish her. AVhere she was weak he was 
strong, with strength enough for Ijoth and to spare. If she was 
afraid, there was no attempt to reason away her fears, — she was 
protected. If she had a whim it was not disregarded as a whim, 
it was gratified. Her just and sensitive nature responded to this 
generosity. Too intent and earnest to be wholly fair, she had been 
apt to think that mirthfulness detracted somewhat from dignity, 
and it took her a little while to learn that fun and frolic do not 
lower the life they immeasurably lighten. The school-girl liking, 
which had not perhaps gathered in the full measure of a girl's 
ideal respect from the mud-pies of childhood and the lake pic- 
nics of subsequent student intimacy, deepened into a more than 
ideal confidence as she found her husband true to every public 
and })i'ivate trust. She saw him advance in the regard of men. 
She saw herself surrounded — it is no small thino- — with all the 



INTBODUCTION. 21 

comforts of material prosperity. Every aspiration of her nature 
was fed by his all-pervading fidelity. Not only was her mind 
respected, l:)ut her very caprices were cherished with the hap- 
piest commingling of tenderness and raillery. Her ambition 
was satisfied Ijy his outward success, her tastes were cultivated 
bv his constant assistance, her heart rested on his entire devo- 
tion. So her marriage, which began like any marriage, only 
with greater hazard than most because of her greater suscep- 
tibility, grew into the identity of interest, the acuteness of sym- 
pathy, the love which is self-love of a perfect union. 

" Mamma," drawled one of her vounu; children, after we had 
been listening to a picturesque and entertaining diatribe against 
a woman who had been bemoanino; her sacrifice at going into 
the country for her husband's health. " Mamma, would you 
sacrifice us to papa?" 

"Sacrifice you!" she cried, the lightnings of her wrath still 
flashino- throuo-h her o'cntle voice and die-away manner, " I 
would see vou all in Topliet for your father's sake !" 

And notwithstandina; the badinage it was essential truth, and 
her children " knew their place." 

But while and where she loved she made. Where a man 

might have stooped she held him up by the compelling virtue 

of her own erectness. Exacting to the uttermost farthing, from 

those who came into her sphere, all mental rectitude and all 

moral force, she made it impossible for one to live with her and 

not live at one's best. Even for such as were brought into but 

slight contact, it went hard with the ignoble'. She had not an 

4 



22 INTROD UCTION. 

atom of that amiability which wraps good and evil alike in the 
mantle of inane praise. She had the awful gift of discernment, 
— she saw clearly. She had the rare gift of expression, — she 
spoke accurately. In her insatiable cra-ving lor the best she 
sometimes failed to remember that we are dust. She was so 
little compounded of dust herself that she was apt to forget 
its real ponderosity, and demanded wings where it was much 
that the poor, weighted human creature managed to walk. Her 
intellectual apprehension was so clear, her moral perception so 
acute, that she could not fail to discern and analyze every man, 
woman, and child who came before her. No external condition 
of theirs affected her clear insight. Wealth or poverty, igno- 
rance or culture, modesty or self-assertion, — nothing veiled from 
her penetrating eyes the character that lay beneath. She divined 
without purpose, simply because it was in her to divine. She 
described, she dramatized, she improvised, because she was born 
an artist. In her fiooks she has dealt with the past, and has 
naturally seen it through a golden haze ; so we have chiefly 
soft, tender, poetic effects. Scarcely appears there at all the 
pungent sarcasm, the mental impatience, the delicately fierce 
invective, the odd imagery, the startling combinations and ex- 
aggeration, the radical dislodgments which joined with her inex- 
haustilde benevolence to make her conversation and her letters 
altogether fascinating. Her commonest talk was piquant and 
forcible. Her hastiest note was elegant. The undress of her 
soul was tidy. The whole habit of lier mind was scholarly. 
She was therefore the most unpretentious of women. 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

Happily, her severe exactingiiess was balanced hy a l^oundless 
beneficence, — more than Ijalanced, overweighted, — for where she 
had once befriended it seemed impossible for her to blame. 
Withal, her whole nature was informed with a subtile, feminine 
gentleness, so that even in her strongest moral repulsions she 
was winsome. Her sharpest disapproval was uttered in the 
voice of the cooing dove, — as low and soft. She revolted against 
religious and social convention with an appealing charm that 
made revolt seem more attractive than accord. 

The history of her external life is marked by the same events 
as that of most women, — the birth and death of children, the 
requirements of her husband's profession. The early years of 
their marriage were passed in Great Falls, New Hampshire. 
Here little Willard Ashton was born and died, here little Marion 
was Ijorn, and here little Margaret died. The boy looked with 
too questioning eyes on the unanswering world, lisped too soon 
his little loves and thoughts, and died when only ten months 
old. Marion, sturdy, independent, self-willed, a little soul prop- 
erly ensphered in the wildness and wantonness of nature, yet 
loving books with unquenchable ardor ; full of poetry, alive 
with individuality, daring and defiant, with her father's strength 
and her mother's intensity, — Marion kept up the fight and the 
fun for ten blithe years, but perished at last in the malaria of 
Washington. Little Margaret, little perfect human flower, un- 
folded her tender life only just enough to — 

" Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." 
Tokens of these children fjill soft and fragrant, like petals from 



24 nWTROD UCTIOK 

fresh-plucked roses, all along their mother's after-paths. Espe- 
cially were thev ministering spirits summoned to comfort the sor- 
rowful. To mourning mothers this mother revealed the grief she 
hid from the world, sometimes with almost too stern a repression. 

" I think," she wrote to one such, " of your house with his 
helplessness and daintiness and beautilul promise gone out of it; 
and I know, because I have known, just what a forlorn weight is 
tugging at your heart, and how hard it will be to get back again 
to the vocations and interests which occupied your lite before this 
glorified child of yours got interwoven with the web of your life. 

" You will never do that. You have gotten on to a higher 
plane. Henceforth this little child will walk with you, be grow- 
ing ever and you growing with him. His early crown of angel- 
hood, close upon your glorious crown of motherhood, has made 
you sure when you die of a child's welcome into heaven. If 
I die to-night three of mine are, I trust, safe before me. . . . 
Dear little Margie, I can never get away Irom the soft touch 
of her little hands. iVnd next to that I am moved by a look 
she gave me one morning. .Dear little things! They leave 
but few tokens, but such as they have take hold. 

'' Of one thing be sure : that the memory of your child will 
make your whole life richer and fuller and happier. By slow 
degrees there will come to you the second and serener joy in 
him of a second possession; . . . but after all, dear S., the facts 
are terribly stern, and only made tolerable Ity other facts just 
as stern,— that it is only for a little, when the same shall have 
passed upon us all." 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

And to another : 

" Let me tell you how out of this triple loss there has come 
to us a thrice blessed possession of joy and consolation. These 
children are not dead to us. The great universe holds them, 
and somehow they seem in Ijeing to have expanded to the whole 
measure of the universe. They are never absent from us. Where 
we go thev go. We know them just as we always did by name. 
Thev help educate our other children ; we think of them always 
as progressing and surpassing in acquisition all possible earthly 
capacity of those they have left behind. Above all, we think 
of them as waiting to meet us." 

And still to another : 

" You will soon begin to marvel how this event shortens time, 
how it bridges the way, and how much more precious it really 
is to follow after than to go before. 

" Perhaps you won(,ler at my writing, l^ut truly such ex- 
pression is a sort of second nature with me. So much riches 
have I in heaven that this world has not a shadow of hold 
upon me. My seeming indifference is my way of expressing 
the intensifying of so much of my life by the sublime mystery 
of death. 

" If I am poor in such works as are seen, I am rich in sym- 
pathy with the bereaved, and out of that store, which is perennial, 
L offer much to you." 

The loss of these children loosened her hold upon her other 
children. She loved them not less, but she had no sense of 
securitv in them. She watched over them with a fidelitv that 



26 INTROD UCTION. 

found nothing insignificant. Their studies, their diversions, 
their companions, their clothes, their accomphshments and affec- 
tations, the caprice of the moment, the plans for their future, — 
everything that pertained to her children was her dailv and 
hourly care. In finally establishing her home, in ordering her 
house, in all her fashioning and furbishing, in her foreign travel, 
her summer sojourning, her winter work, the one thine; she had 
in view was the advantage of her children. She arranged plav- 
rooms, built conservatories, held classes, cultivated flowers, took 
journeys, painted pictures, wrote books for one special purpose, 
for one assured pu]:)lic, — Lucy, Louise, and Philip. And with her 
almost fierce devotion she had a marvellous gift for overlooking 
non-essentials. She was microscopic in places where some mothers 
are telescopic, but she was equally telescopic where others are 
microscopic. She knew how every moment of her children's 
time was occupied ; but when she had sent them into the large, 
open, country yard to play, she expected them to have sense 
enough to look out for themselves that they were not run over 
l)y the country wagons. . And the little toddlers justified her 
faith, though the neighbors were sometimes horrified at their 
narrow escapes. She had not a moment's time or strength to 
posture her children for artistic or sentimental admiration, nor 
had she, it may be added, any to spare upon other people's 
children. She seemed sometimes indifferent, almost scornful, 
when she had exhausted her small store of strength upon the 
essentials, and took refuge in al)straction from any draft made 
upon her for the unimportant. She would not lose the hastening 



INTROD UCTIOK 27 

glory of a sunset on the hills, though each baby were setting- 
up a separate and sonorous howl in the carriage over some 
childish quarrel. 

Mr. RoUins's business took them to AVashington for some 
years, where he held the various offices which lead up to and 
include the Commissionership of Internal Revenue. The position 
was not much to her liking, and she did not take over-kindly 
to her Wasliina;ton life. Her time and ol)servation were not so 
fully absorbed by her family that she did not note the social 
and political world. She Avrote, as she had written occasionrdly 
for many years, letters lor the newspapers, all of which were 
widely read and well received. 

The later, perhaps the serener, possibly the happiest years 
of Mrs. RoUins's life were passed in Philadelphia. The mild 
climate suited her feeble physical power. Her summers were 
spent on the sea-shore or among her native mountains, and her 
own beautiful home was not so deeply emljosomed in the city 
as to banish sunshine and the Ijirds. At her chamber window 
she could hear the winds sio;hino; amono; the pines, and the 
light came to her broken and shimmering through flowers and 
greenery. Some months of European travel she was strong- 
enough thoroughly to enjoy, and the Centennial Exhibition 
brought the world's treasures to her own doors. How wide 
and glad those doors swung open to all her friends through 
that gala season there are hundreds to remember. Everything 
she had strength to enjoy she enjoyed, and the rest she made 
up by the enjoyment of others. Her hospitality never knew 



28 . INTRODUCTION. 

liounds for those she loved, though she was a great deal more 
rigid, I trust, than Heaven in excluding those of whom she did 
not approve. In these sunny, trjuiquil years her soul sprang 
up in all sorts of ex})eriment. She studied, taught, embroidered, 
painted, wrote with fresh zest. She renewed and enlarged her 
vouthful acquaintance with languages ; read history and litera- 
ture with young girls, the comrades of her daughters ; sewed 
daisies and daifodils and peacocks' feathers all over her house 
till the muscles of her right arm gave out; covered jars and 
screens and pla<.|ucs Avith numberless lilies and cresses, — since 
she wrought only for love, and of the great world of possi- 
bilities she loved to paint only the life of still water. It was 
as if some unseen, irresistible force urged her on, unwitting, to 
surround the husband and children whom she was so soon to 
leave with the visible tokens of her presence. 

In many ways this strange urgency impelled her. She who 
had laughingly, but effectively, resisted all beseeching for her 
portrait, who was too timid to venture alone into the great city 
which lay only just beyond her garden gate, on that last winter 
proposed the portrait herself, selected her artist, and climbed, 
sometimes unaccompanied, into his sky-studio and gave him as 
many sittings as he required. A little stone, which Marion had 
held in her hand when she died, was taken Irom its box and 
made into a seal for her son, with suitable and suggestive in- 
scription and appropriate setting. A copy of iVppleton's Ency- 
clopaedia she sent to the little library of her native village, and, 
what was most unlike herself, she consented that her husband 



INTROD UCTION. 29 

slionld insert her name as the donor. While yet in her usual 
health and with no visible reason for expecting anything but 
length of days, she destroyed all but two or three of her pub- 
lished Washington letters, on the oTound that their value had 




been abated by the lapse of time and she did not wish her 
friends to be bothered with them after she was gone. 

Her last work was her books. She wrote them rapidly, 
eagerly, for the king's business required haste. The leisure of 
her last two vears was uiven to them at home and at the sea- 



30 INTRODUCTION. 

side. The second was begun as soon as the tirst was tinisheil, 
and withal she took not haste enough, for an echo of sweet songs 
fell brokenly from her dying lips, never to l)e caught by voice 
or lute. 

Death came to her stealthily, or shall 1 say, benignantl}- ? 
With increasing weakness, but without pain or foreboding, she 
went gently down to the gates of death. And when they opened, 
behold, it was not death but life. In the last paragraph of her 
last book she had written : 

" There is a chamber window out of which in childhood I used 
to watch the sunset-gilded crown of E,ed Mountain, and while 
sitting there I have often thought that in the afterglow of some 
fortunate day I would like to pass out of earth into heaven." 

And it was so. In the early afterglow of her most fortunate 
day she passed from languor into lite. 

Her religion had always been a principle, never a barrier, 
never a bond. She had small respect for forms. She had in- 
difference to forms out of whic-h the ins}tiration had vanished. 
Death justified all her instincts. Faith upheld her, and let 
every shrinking human creature who may read these words 
gather courage ; for this weak, timid woman went out alone into 
the great unknown without a fear. 

Her last day came to her unwarned. Her physician, from 
an experience of nearly half a century, advised that nothing be 
said to herself or her children of her peril. The night had 
been not untroubled. In her dreams and her talk as she slept 
she was wandering in the White Mountains. The doctor's early 



ryTRODrcTiON. 31 

arrival found her awake and surprised. Of her nurse she asked 
what was the hour, and who had summoned the doctor, and 
immediately responded to the answer, " Then I am going to 
die, and I want to see my children." 

Thus all l:)arriers were removed. With entire calmness and 
clearness, and with a well-defined regard to the needs of each, 
to each dear child alone she gave last words which can only 
be cherished in their inmost hearts. To a few friends she 
spoke a calm and loving farewell. The greater part of her last 
dav she was alone with her husband, and through him to her 
hosts of friends she sent parting messages. Her own family 
and her husl)and's i'amily, hardly less dear, she remembered, 
name by name, with tenderest greeting. Everything was real 
and confident. It was exactly and only as if she were setting 
out a little earlier than they, on a journey which all would take, 
to a land where love awaited her. She talked of the past and 
the present as Avell as of the future, and her language was never 
more vigorous, her directions were never more clear. She desired 
that a book left at the house by a friend be returned, and that 
an account which she had overpaid be remembered. She desig- 
nated tokens to be given to special friends in her name, and 
sundry of her own benefactions to be continued after her death. 
In no one word did she betray fear, regret, or apprehension. 
For weeks the lial)it of her life had so increased upon her that 
she could hardly bear to let her husband go out of her sight; 
but this last dav, as if she wished to try a little what separation 
would lie I'lefore it was enforced, she ur^ed him to s;o awav for 



32 INTIIODUCTIOX. 

rest. To this jieculiarlv depciKlnit woman, who for years had 
never been anywhere without him, who (ii<l not think she coidd 
go anywhere, even to her own mother's house, without him, — 
to her was Q-iven such new courau'e and streno;th that she went 
down unshrinking alone into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 
" God is indeed merciful," she said, " that he has made me wish 
to go." 

" Ashton, there is nothing, after all. in this world to really 
help us but Christ and his cross." 

" Yes, Ellen, from science and philosophy and everything else, 
Ave must all come back to the cross." 

" No," she answered, quickly. " No, go forward to it rather." 

" I am not so devotional as you, V)ut my faith is as strong. 
It began in my childhood, and I have clung to it always." 

" At a time like this, omnipotence is nothing, omniscience is 
nothing ; the love of C^hrist is everything. Ah ! how that sweet, 
patient face of his looks out from all the picture-galleries of 
Europe, out of Holman Hunt's picture down-stairs — looks' into 
my very soul I 

" Tell mother that I will be waiting for her, and J. and H. 
and F. and j\L that I will couk^ down to meet them, and give 
my love to all your family. I have done with the world and 
will say no more." 

When her lips had orown ria-id, so that she could no longer 
frame a sentence, a whispered word w'ould indicate the direction 
of her thoughts. " Rock," she hardly more than breathed, and 
" The shadow of a o-reat rock in a w^earv land" and " Lead me 



INTROD UCTIOX. ;i3 

to the rock that is higher than I" would be repeated to her, and 
no child was ever more manifestly soothed and refreshed bv 
mother- words tlian she by the wonderful mother- words of heaven. 

Her children were watching and praying in the library that 
their mother might live to go to heaven on Sundav mornin^. 
By her they sent their love to Willie, to Marion, and to Margaret, 
and she promised them she would not fail to carry it. 

Her breathing became labored. She had no pain, but great 
weariness. 

" Marie, Marie,'' she softly said. 

" Marie ?" repeated the nurse. 

" No," she answered clearly, "not Marie, but Marion." And 
raising her right arm and beckoning with her hand and index 
linger, as one calls to him another whom he sees, she continued, 
" Marion, my daughter, come, come!" 

She spoke no more and suffered no more, but went so gently 
that love itself could not know the moment of her departure. 

Gail Hamilton. 







^ ]/^''''% %^ 




•ETCHIRl^^ 




X Northern New England, in the traditional good 
old times, to own a house was a condition of thrifty 
citizenship. For this a young couple would toil early 
and late with heroic self-denial. No matter how humble this 
home was, it must be one's own. When a man married, he at 
once set up a household, and, as he needed, he let out his four 
walls, and seamed and patched them. His barns ran over, and 
he added to them. He planted an orchard, and set out poplars 
before his door. The roughness of toil was ground into his 
bones and muscles. He* grew hard-featured and hard-fisted, 
while his wife grew jaded and angular. Their children became 
like them. They were all weather-changed into a kind of 
peculiar peasantry, a readily recognized product of their con- 
dition, — the busy, honest, persistent, ho])eful, helpful New Eng- 



m NJ^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

land fanners family. Tlie visible signs of their labors were 
hardly more than an orchard of straggling trees; the annnal 
rotation of crops ; and the daily spilling-out from the doors of 
familv-lile. It was a most simple living, easily described with 
few words : but the core of progressive culture, the nursery of 
strong character. 

Their houses and their surroundings were such as minht be 
expected. The a|)ple-trees, wliich they set out, bore crabbed 
fruit, and were of little value ; but, as a feature of farm-life, 
they served their ])urpose. There were always good apples 
enough for home use. The names of some of them, given 1j\' 
accident, became household words ; and, when thev had lived 
their life out. the excellence of their fruits passed into tradi- 
tion. I could walk to-day to the very spot where stood Farmer 
M.'s Long-nose and Pudding-sweet, — two ragged, stalwart trees, 
lamous in the district. The mildly-sour Long-nose tasted best 
when just picked from the greensward, and the mealy Pudding- 
sweet when sucked by the eater while sitting uj)on a- low-lying 
branch of the tree which bore it. 

An old orchard is a. friendly place. Wherever you stumble 
upon one the spirit of homelikeness and past occupation are 
with it. If there are no house-walls to be seen, you are sure 
to lind near by the rubbish of them, bv wliich vou know that 
once the simple })rocesses of farm-life went daily on under its 
trees. The jagged, sprouting old stumps are the record of it. 

On the whole, what farm appendage was better in possession, 
is better in memorv, than its riotous old orchard? It was, in 



ETCHINGS. 37 

spring, a rose-garden, which scented the air with attar, and 
filled the landscape with a transient glory. In summer, standing 
in the foreground of its overtopping verdure, the houses let out 
into it the homeliness of their vocations. Then into the pos- 
tures and implements of housewives, and the work they did, 
passed the glamour of its growth and its sunshine. In it, and 
by it, people and things, otherwise unattractive, became beautiful 
incidents and accidents of it. You have not forgotten the bare- 
armed women, spreading their linen to bleach ; pans scalding in 
the sunshine; the bee-hives; the grindstone; the mowers whetting 
their scythes, and other loose-lying debris of farm-work ; the 
picturesque absorption of the orchard's summer-life. You hold 
fast in memory some tree, or trees, the ripening and gradual 
gathering of whose fruits were happy features of your childhood. 

The orchard almost always started from the back-door of a 
farm-house, where burdocks and other rank-smelling weeds grew 
and waste waters trickled out; but it stretched into a verdure, 
the sweetness and cleanliness and tenderness of which could 
only be found under its trees. Here night-dews lingered, and 
apples mellowed toothsomely under the matted grass. Here was 
the couch of the tired laborer and the play-ground of children, 
who wore ruts in its sod, and half lived in summer upon its forage. 

The Lombardy poplars, which were planted in front of these 
earlier farm-houses, were stitf, compact, erect trees, always ag- 
gressive upon the landscape. They were fast-growing, but of 
short-lived vigor, and died by early though slow decay. They 

were perhaps the natural outcrop of a generation which began 

6 



38 yEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and ended with shoulder to the i^lough, and hand to the (hstalF; 
whose chief literature was the Bible ; whose law was truth, and 
whose highest recreation was the rest of the Sabbath. You still 
see, here and there, these aged poplars scattered through New 
England. They are ghosts of trees, half dead, often isolated; 
yet, should search 1)6 made, sure to be found standing steadfast 
l)y the site of an ancient homestead. Often they linger in front 
of a square, ilat-roofe<:l old house, given over, like themselves, 
to decay ; both come down from a long dead generation. They 
have a wav of lifting themselves up and standing out from a 
landscape. One sees them from afar, like index-fingers, pointing 
backwards, not without pathos, to the past. 

If the farmers who planted these trees seemed hard and stern, 
it was owing largely to their resolute fidelity to the necessities 
of their vocation. Tliey were pioneers ; the hewers out of a 
path to a broader culture. They were not unlike their own 
hills, which, though rugged and steep, were, at the same time, 
the glory of the landscape. They loved the homes to which 
they had given the richness and strength of their days. That 
power of association which comes from dwelling long in a s[>ot, 
and which clings eternally to it, took deep root in them. At 
the same time, there went out from them, into their walls and 
furnishings, that sweetness of life-expression given to them by 
long use. Time mellowed their homes ; scars enriched them ; 
necessity added to them, — until, from very bare beginnings, 
grew the quaintly furnished, picturesque, simply beautiful old 
farm-houses. 



ETCHINGS. 



39 



Very much of the tlirif't and honesty pecuhar to the New 
Enghmcl race has flowed through this primitive and sturdy stock. 
Looking back, I see men 
and women whose characters 
were of the best ; the hnes 
of which, hke etchings, are 
sharp and suggestive. 

The last time I ever saw 
old Farmer ]\I. he was firmly 
grasping a pitchibrk, which 
was planted in his load; and, 
from his cart, was giving 
directions to half a score 




of stalwart laborers. His hat was weather-beaten; his garments- 
were coarse and ill-fittino-. To one unused to country life, he 



40 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

would have seemed a rough old man, — a common farmer; the 
worn-out owner of a few acres and a little money, gotten Ijy 
working while others slept; by self-denial when indulgence would 
have seemed a virtue ; one who doubled the toils of summer, 
and cheated himself out of the rest of winter, — a sort of barren 
Avaif, almost cast out from one century upon the shore of 
another. 

Altogether otherwise this man seemed to me. I had known 
him from my earliest childhood. He had done faithfully the 
work which had been given liim to do. Whatever lay within 
its scope and possibilities he had accomplished. Whatever of 
dignity could be given, by truth and industry and self-respect, 
to a farmer's life, had been given to his. Forty years before 
he had been a rustic king in his fields. He was a king still, — 
this old man of eighty-odd years. There was the same stamp 
of force upon him. He was old age wiser than youth ; decay 
more potent than growth ; weakness dictating to strength. Time 
had ploughed over him ; but, if his hand had lost its cuiming, 
his eye had not lost its fire. If his body was wellnigh spent, 
his intellect was unabated. As he stood, poised upon the fruits 
of his harvest, ruling, with positive will and clear judgment, his 
laborers of a later generation, he seemed like the old hero that 
he was ; a half-defiant conqueror over circumstance, brave and 
resistant to the last. It was o;rand to see him, this half-wild 
son of nature, standing clear-cut against the blue sky, held up 
by the instruments and adjuncts of a life of toil ; the wrinkled, 
aged harvester, tossed out at his last, with a sort of fierce ges- 



ETCHINGS. 41. 

tnre, into this transient, Init suo;o;estive, i")icture. Clad in liome- 
spun, roughened by toil, with no acquired graces of speech, 
there was yet about him a certain expression of inborn dignity 
which compelled respect. His eye was piercing ; his voice in- 
cisive ; his words few ; his manner forcible. He was an eager, 
honest, successful man, who had taken and held life by siege 
and storm. 

This farmer's story will be read hereafter in character ; not 
in books. It would be tame written out, the daily lite of this 
man, who, through all his working years, tilled the soil in sum- 
mer and split rocks in winter. But by and by some famous man 
will have inherited good blood from this farmer, who, in his 
plain village life, was known for his uprightness, his thrift, his 
intelligence, and his sagacity. He will be proud of this an- 
cestor, whom the bad feared and the good honored ; of this 
man, whose nobility of nature gave breadth to the narrowness 
of his calling. Some woman, with more than ordinary beauty, 
may owe it to this old man, whose sinews, given early to the 
tuition of nature, grew into symmetrical stature; and whose 
fi'esh young features were hardened, by care and exposure, into 
an expression of honest and heroic audacity. 

S., the blacksmith, who shod horses by day and after night- 
fall reasoned with his neighbors in the village store, was a re- 
markaljle man. He was well read ; was especially strong in 
history, and an excellent debater. His eyes were always blood- 
shot, and his face was as hard-lined as the steel bars upon which 
he wrought ; yet, on Sundays, washed clean irom the smut of 



42 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

toil, it was a face woi-thv to Ite remembered. Thm he was a 
noble-looking man, sitting, broad-browed, erect, and observant, 
at the head of his pew, where he followed Parson B.'s long 
and sensible discourses Avith the keen relish of an apt logician. 
This blacksmith shod horses admirably. His shoes fitted, and 
his nails nevt'r missed. In liis chosen vocation he had a perfect 
career, because whatever he did he did well. People came to 
him from far and near, lor no known blacksmith shod horses 
so well as he. In tliis merit of his work lay tlie [)athos oi his 
life; for this man, who shod horses, might have ruled men. Tlic 
logic which swayed the loungers in the village store should have 
Ijeen given to his equals. It is a mystery why this stalwart 
wrano;ler, who mio;ht ha\'e fiu'ured and a;rown famous in the 
world, hammered away, all his days, at horses' feet in a village 
smithy. 

There is no end to these remembered representative characters; 
quaint and positive, always grand, because underlaid by sim- 
plicity and fidelity to right. 

These farmers did not adorn their houses much, either in-doors 
or out, for they were almost always work-driven and weary. 
Nature took up their task where they left it. They planted 
fences and gates and well-sweeps. She, with lier frosts and 
stains and mosses, tumbled and embellished them. The saplings 
they stai'ted grew into prim poplars and dense, ill-bearing or- 
chards; l:)ut there was al)out these half- worthless trees, in their 
moss-clad old age, a kind of fitness which served its time and 
pnrp)0se. AVlien the square, brown farm-houses began to decay, 



ETCHINGS. 



43 



and farmers to graft their newly-planted stocks, the poplars and 
shaggy old apple-trees began also to die. Each was a sort of 
a])pendage to the other, and so they passed away together. 




The sweetest and most natural outgrowth of old-time pastoral 
life was a love of, and clinging to, the old homesteads. Once 
New England was full of them; great, brown, roomy, homely 
houses, facing the south ; led to by green lanes ; shut in by 



44 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

ancestral fields; standing quite even with the greensward, which 
thev met with low-lying stones dug out from tlieir own pastures. 
Each had its family Ijurial-place, — blessed spot. They were all 
rieli in spi'ings and brooks and woodlands. They had added to 
them, year after vear, the glory of trees and bushes and vines ; 
the wild growth of seeds, flung by the winds into the crevices 
of walls and unused places. That which was peculiar to them, 
that wliicli eould not be simulated Ijy art, was a certain Ijeauty 
given to them by time and use and decay, — a sort of mellowing 
into the landscape of the piles and tlieir adjuncts, by which each 
homestead took unto itself an individual expression for its owner 
and his descendants. Tlie aspect of a farm-house was, to the 
children of it, as personal of recognition as the face of a father 
or grandfather. It was to be held in the family name, and go 
down with it. It was the sanctuary of homely virtues ; the 
centre of family reunions; the place of its yearly thanksgiving; 
a spot from wliich its membership had enlarged and diverged ; 
and to which, when they died, its sons and daughters were 
brought back for burial. In it, a-eneration after veneration, 
there was always one left. It was either a faithtul son or 
daughter who had mari'ied one of her own sort. These men 
and women were spoken of as " the boys and girls" at home, 
and, as sucli, they were most admirable. No matter how little 
fitted they seemed to be for any other sphere, as the appendages 
and rulers of these old houses they could have hardly been 
changed lor the l^etter. They were a portion of their appro- 
priate machinery, and stayed by them from choice, because their 



ETCHINGS. 45 

lives had not grown away from them. The men had a certain 
audacity of mien ; the simple abandon of persons whose dealings 
were largely with nature. The women had no artificial ways; 
little learning ; but much good sense, and their greatest charm 
was that they were easily satisfied with small pleasures. Their 
children were the "country cousins"; as much a sweet feature 
of farm-life as were its dandelions and buttercups and daisies. 

Thus, by rotation, the homestead was always filled. The 
foreign land, to which its indwellers all travelled, was the little 
burial-ground close by. The journey to this was short by linear 
measurement ; but, reckoned by the events and worth of the 
days and months and years it took to get there, it was a travel 
wonderfully rich in effort and results. The external signs of 
this journey were the ruts in the boards and stones, worn by 
the steady tramp of feet. What you could not see was the 
life which had been constantly diverging from such fountains 
of piety, truth, and industry. 

As I look back, what strikes me most in that old country 
living is its simplicity, its earnestness, its honesty, and its dig- 
nity. The men and women seemed to grapple with their in- 
herited burdens. They were a race of born athletes and wrestlers 
with the soil ; the natural outgrowth of it. 

I see them walking, as they used, across the green fields to 
the meeting-house, which stood on a hill a mile away from my 
grandfather's, clad in their long-kept, variously-made holiday 
garments, — a quaint procession. There are samples of shawls 
and dresses, preserved by me in memory from the attire of my 



46 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

grandfather's fellow-worshippers, every thread of whose real 
texture has been eaten away. I know just how they were 
worn. Old Dame H. had a soft, silky, crimson shawl, which 
she drew closely over her shoulders, and pinned three times 
down in front. The pins seemed never to vary a thread; and 
year after year her sharp shoulders rubbed at its warp and woof 
until it grew stringy and streaked. 

There were coats and cloaks and dresses, so far removed from 
any suggestion of mode that their strangeness of make, joined 
with richness of fabric, gave dignity to them, and the men and 
women who wore them were the authors of a true style. 

Old Squire S. never put aside his plaid cloak lined with green 
baize. His sons and daughters went away from the homestead, 
and came back richly clad in the world's fashions. That made 
no difference to him. He walked up the church aisle, year after 
year, in front of the gayest of them, with his old plaid, which 
wrapped him about like a tartan ; and, through the singing of 
psalms, prayers, and benedictions, he stood, with the green baize 
flung over his shoulders, unconscious that there was anything 
queer or old-lashioned about him. There was nothing old-fash- 
ioned. He was a splendid old man, erect, proud, with a broad, 
white brow, and a grand record for brain-work in all the courts. 
The old cloak had become a kind of toga, invested by him with 
the worth of long association, and so had grown to be invaluably 
a part of himself. 

There is a sentiment about old wraps, which have travelled 
with you, and stood by you when the flimsiness of other attire 



ETCHINGS. 47 

has failed. It needs not to be woven in with camel's hair, and 
it does not suit the texture of lace. It is hostile to fashion, 
and comes only with using. It is tender, and touches you like 
keepsakes of lost friends. Your best imported wraps are those 
which you have brought across the sea yourself; which have 
the imprint of travel and good companionship ; which have been 
tossed about in many lands, and had their colors mellowed by 
much usage. Such can never be duplicated nor simulated. They 
are a true tapestry, inwrought with a part of the richness of 
your life. Why cannot some web be woven fit for lifelong "wear, 
so that memory may be allowed to crystallize about it, and then 
the mantles of those we have loved could literally fiill upon us ? 




My 
grandfather 

built his house . , 

in the middle of his ' ' 

farm. All the farm-houses in that neighborhood were thus 
centrally located. Isolation was the result ; so was also economy 
of working force, — no mean item where the soil was hard, rocky, 
and ungrateful, and bread was truly to be won Ijy sweat of the 



50 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

brow. Distance lent much l)eauty to these plain farm-houses. 
The long, tree-arched green lanes leading to them, their cum- 
■hrous gates, their straggling sheds, and half-slovenly profusion 
of wood-piles and carts, went into the picture ; and the softening 
aspect of smoke and cloud and outlying verdure gave to them 
the baptismal touch of all-creative nature. 

]\Iy grandfather's lane was overhung fiy stalwart elms and 
maples. Just at its entrance was a bul)l)ling spring, whose 
waters trickled down l)y the way-side through beds of violets 
and Avild flag. The lane itself was fenced in by a stone wall ; 
in my day tumbled liy frost and fretted with moss. Its turf 
was like velvet. Two deep wheel-ruts, the wear of years, ran 
throuo-h it, in and out of which the family chaise Ijonnced rol- 
lickingly, for liorses were sure to prick up their ears and C|uicken 
their pace as soon as they snuffed the cool spring. You know 
that pleasant sound, when, upon turning from the hard highwav, 
their hoofs struck the porous soil. At the lane's farther end 
was a gate with a huge, upright beam, uncouth, clumsA^, and 
slow to move on its hinges, — apt to sag, — ploughing a semi- 
circle witli its nigh end, and weighing heavily upon the shoulder 
of the opener. Endurance seemed to have entered into all the 
I luilding plans of old-time workers ; and size and weight were 
to them the emblems of endurance. About my grandfather's 
gate smart-weed and dock-weed and plantain grew profusely, — 
mean weeds ; but Hannah, maid-of-all-work, distilled from them 
dyes and balsams. Beauty lay hidden in their juices, which 
Hannah expressed and fastened into her jxitiently spun and 



THE FABM. 51 

woven fabrics of cotton, linen, and woollen. Over the gate 
and over the well a massive butternut-tree flung its branches. 
It stands to-day, with its trunk half-rotten, and I sit under it 
and seem again a cliild. Only for a moment, for, with the years 
that have gone into my life, something sweet and beautiful has 
gone out of it. I)ear little Benny ! you and I came first to- 
gether through the gateway into the farm-house yard. A white- 
haired old man stood in the door to welcome us. It was late 
on a summer's dav : so late that the cattle were lowinti- to be 

O 

let through the pasture-bars ; the work of the day was well- 
nigh past, and the dews and peace of night were beginning to 
fall. Sweet, sacred eventide ! Gone are they all, — the dear old 
man, the beautiful lioy, the herds, and the laborers who wrought 
with them. The structures, built by mortal hands, are rotting 
and tumbling; the tree is dying; the rest are shadowy things 
of memory. I look down into the deep old well, with its unsafe 
curb and sweep (how foolish I am !), for the trout little Benny 
dropped there more than forty years ago. I see nothing save 
green, slimy rocks and the shadow of my own face. 

I say little Benny, because dead children never grow old. We 
talk of wdiat they might have been, but we possess only wliat 
they were. Little Benny died more than forty years ago, — a 
beautiful, precocious boy. Had he lived, he might have lieen 
a famous . man. He is only remembered as the loving, lovaljle 
child, and as such I go Ijack to meet him. Very few are the 
lasting impressions of tlie forms and features of lost ones. Some 
intensity of word or look or action glorifies a moment of a 



52 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

child's life, and makes its expression an imperishable thing of 
memory. 

Marion, brown-eyed Marion, rosy, radiant, flinging back her 
haiv with careless abandon, bursts into my room. By that one 
attitude and expression I best remember her. You can never 
know what unwitting posture of your child is to become a 




treasure to you. If it dies, you will lose hold of its heart- 
rending reality, and will be consoled by the ideal suggestiveness 
of its occasional aspects. This is the healing which time, and 
time alone, brings to your sorrows. 

Thus talks the old well to me, treading cautiously upon its 
rickety platform. High up dangles the rusty bucket-handle; 



THE FARM. 53 

the balance weight is gone ; the sweep and beam are rotten 
and ready to falL A spasm of tenderness seizes me ; things 
take hie. Summer days come back to me, and with them beau- 
tiful rural pictures of tired men and patient animals slaking 
their thirst. I shut my eyes and the yard is alive again. Oxen 
are lapping cool water from the trough ; laborers are grasping 
the dripping bucket, poised on the edge of the curb; upon the 
doorstep sits my grandfather, his white hair streaming over his 
shoulders. How clear-cut the whole scene is, — this picture of 
common farm-life ! The oxen lift their heads and blink their 
eves, and then go back to their draught. It seems as if they 
never would be done. The men let down the bucket twice and 
thrice over, and up it comes, each time more coolly drippmg than 
before. Its crystal streams splash back into the deep old well 
with a pleasant, resonant sound. Hannah comes out with her 
pails and fills them, and I, standing on tiptoe, lean over the 
curb and watch the water as it trickles down the mossy rocks. 
She is meanwhile unconscious, as I am, that through those 
simple acts our lives are being irrevocably woven together, each 
with the other, as well as with the drinkers and drawers around 
us, in a never-fading picture. Dear, cool, overflowing, delightful 
old well ! your waters in those summer days were magic waters, 
and the creatures who drank of you, even the dumbest of them, 
were by you baptized for me with an undying beauty. 

The heavy farm-gates, though uncouth and hard to manage, 
were made pleasant objects by age. The lane-gate of my grand- 
father, hugged by a vine, had put out grasses and weeds from 



54 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

its joints, and was mottled all over with moss. The make of 
these gates was always a marvel. Pegs and supple withes stood 
instead of hinges ; and a strong bar, fastened to their centre, 
ran, with a sharp angle, to the upper end of a tall post. They 
were in keeping with the well-sweeps, the ragged fences, and 
stone walls. They grew, picturesquely, into the landscape, and 
pointed out otherwise inconspicuous entrance-ways. These latter 
were often only slight wheel-ruts cut into the sods of the fields, 
so that the gate-posts served as signboards to benighted and 
weary travellers. They loomed up, gray and ghostly, out of 
the darkness of night, and Avere homely signals of hospitality 
in winter snow-wastes. "I see the gate, — Ave're almost there!" 
shouted Bennv. AVe were making our first joint visit to my 
grandfather's farm, and the friendly bars and beams of this gate 
beckoned to us. Hospitable old gate ! — which would never then 
budge an inch at my tugging; but which nevertheless always 
swung, with a right royal arch, wide open, to let me in. 

A second gate, at my grandfather's, opened from the opposite 
side of the flirm-house yard, just beyond the butternut-tree, 
into another lane. This lane went down into the pasture and 
the woodland. Ki its farther end were the clumsy, unstable 
pasture-bars, against which the cattle crowded at nightfall, and 
leaped past the fearless children who let them out. These 
farmers' childreuf who roamed pastures and woods, unmindful 
of herds, and came back shaggy and weighed down with all 
sorts of wild growth, were truly the foster-children of nature. 
Year after vear of their half-untamed lives she srave to them 



THE FARM. 



55 



", I, III i,',i'' ; ''I'lh ,i'i 1 

,,, , jU.l'i:-i...|i^l'..i.'.M.'li.i.'.. Ij|i 



l||llll|||lllni|ll|lli{|lini»lll|ll{1l|llll II lliinn ll lllllll iinni Tiiinniiinimninm n 




llllllllllilllWIIIIIIillllllllililllllllll 

the simple gifts of 
her annual harvests, 
and quickened their 
senses towards that 
in her which was 
imperishaljle. These 
young freebooters 
laid up enduring 



56 > NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

riches. Lying on her pasture-knolls, tossing about amongst her 
dead leaves, tramping through brooks and bogs and brushwood, 
they stumbled upon her treasures unawares. The berries and 
nuts and mints they sought were transient things ; but the glories 
of the days which brouglit them entered into, and gave to them 
a good and delight which were eternal. Those children are 
made richer and better, who have early dealings with Nature ; 
she gives to them a joy which will stand by them all tlieir days. 
If they get it not, they will have missed something most admi- 
rable out of their lives. 

In farmers' families, the driving of the cows to pasture passed 
by rotation from one child to another. Sometimes a man or 
woman of the household took up the task, from necessity or 
inclination, as a duty or diversion. They were, most often, 
thoughtful, observant men and women, to whom their morning 
and evening lessons, such as God gave to them in the changeful 
aspects of earth and sky, were, perhaps half unconsciously, well 
learned. Sweet scents and sounds and sights greeted them. 
They got from the morning strength for the day's burdens, 
and the peace of twilight lifted these burdens from them. I 
recall three men who, all through middle life and far into old 
age, morning and night, at unvarying hours, drove their herds 
to and from the pastures. Their cows knew them, and, in the 
virtue of patience, seemed quite as human as they. They were 
all three grand men, sensible, honest, and carrying weight in 
town affairs. This humljle duty, cheerfully done, did but illus- 
trate and embellish the childlike simplicity of their lives. There 



THE FARM. 



57 



could be no more pastoral picture than that of these respectable 
farmers plodding along the highway with their cows in the early- 
brightness of morning. They were literally walking hand in hand 
with nature. Transplanted into a city, they would have been 
poor in its riches, unfitted for its pursuits and pastimes. On 
the country highway they were heirs of the soil ; lessees of the 
landscapes and sky views ; unconscious absorbents of the earth's 




brightness and beauty. I know" men in liigh places who look back 
with keen pleasure to their cow-driving days, when the lowing 
herds used to come across the rocky pastures to meet them, and 
who, from these enforced morning and evening walks, grew to 
be observers and lovers of nature. I remember with delight my 
grandfather's pasture, poor of soil and scanty of herbage ; uneven 
of surfiice ; its hillocks clad with moss and wintergreen ; cut in 



58 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

two by a clear, bal tilling Ijrook ; shaded here and there by clumps 
of trees ; raei;Q;ed with rocks and ferns and wild shrubs : marshy 
next to the mill-pond, as well as treacherous, and tangled with 
flag and bulrushes. Rare old New England pasture-lands ! You 
were stingy of grass, but you were ueyer-failing in beauty, — 
that beauty wdiich was reyealed to the children, who, next to 
the herds, were your true owners. Early in spring-time, against 
lino'erinu; snow-f)anks, came beds of blue and wdiite yiolets ; a 
little later, hidden among crisp, crackling leayes, pink and wdiite 
arbutus, — sweetest of all spring blossoms. Ferns unfolded ; mint 
scented the brookside ; coltsfoot brightened its shoal bed ; the 
marsh bristled wdth spiked leayes. AVith the coming of summer, 
the water-soaked and porous soil by degrees dried up. One had 
no longer to pick his way from stone to stone across boggy 
places (what early pasture roamer does not recall the oyerrated 
audacity of such passages ?) ; ferns grew strong and deep-colored ; 
l:)0g onions curled their brown coils against the rocks (they would 
not pull now with the old relish) ; weeds and shrubs and stinted 
trees took on the gifts of the passing seasons, and, as you trod 
on them or brushed Ijy them, sent out to you their wild flavors. 
Close by the mill-pond the soil was always soft, and marked by 
the hoof-prints of cattle. Here the pond was shoal and full of 
lilies. On hot summer days the tired animals would stand for 
hours knee-deep in the sluggish water, unconscious pictures of 
peaceful pastoral life. Their crooked trail, winding in and out 
through the dampest and shadiest portion of the pasture-land, 
had a friendly look. Its black line was easy to be traced far into 



THE FARM. 59 

the evening, and was always a pleasant thing to stumble upon. 
It has guided many a wanderer home. What traveller has not 
had his heart gladdened by footprints in waste places ? My path 
was treacherous and hard to follow, but it led one down through 
tall, sweet-scented bushes ; across the shoal brook : over a long 
stretch of ferns ; past rocks and crackling brusliwood, into the 
alders and bulrushes and wild flag, outside of which were the 
shoal water and a lily-bed, where, stuck fast in the mud, was 
a rotting old boat, wliich the waves lapped lazily. 

Here the children from far and near used to come for lilies, 
])usliing with poles out into the pond. One summer day, at 
niii-htfall, a little uirl was missino" from a farmer's house. She 
had gone out in the inorning and had not come back. Two 
weeks went by and no clue of her was found. Meanwhile the 
budded lilies blossomed on the pond, and other children went 
one day in search of them. They came back, not lily-laden, 
but with a great horror on their lips. Pushing about among 
the pads, they had come upon something wliich they dared not 
touch ; something which two weeks before was fairer than any 
lily, but which now was an awful thing, to be hastily put out 
of sight. 

On this shore the children used to plait rush caps and play 
with flag-leaves in mimic warfare. The black, soggy soil was 
honeycombed by their busy feet, and their constant companions 
were the cattle, who cooled themselves in the shoal edge of the 
pond. The blue of the distant hills, the sunshine, the shimmer 
of the pond, the verdure of forest and woodland and lowland 



60 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and upland overarched and surrounded and hemmed them in. 
Absorbed thus by the landscape, they were made transient 
features of its glory. 

When the summer had passed, grasses bloomed, with a faint 
purple haze, on the uplands, and bushes flaunted in crimson, 
forerunners of the dying of the year. Eare pastoral scenes ! 
Again I am watching the shadows of ancient pines, lying across 
the pond ; herds browse the hillocks ; I see the daintily coiling 
smoke of distant farm-houses ; the cocpaetting of clouds and 
sunshine ; the noble framework of hill and forest. The old 
music comes back, — the rino- of the woodman's axe ; the whiz 
of the mill under the hill ; the lowing of herds ; bird-song ; 
insect-hum; and, above all, the drowsy lapping of the pond 
against its shore. Behold the beauty, the plenty, the generosity 
of my i^asture ! 

What shall be said of the woodland, errand, solemn old wood- 
land, with its pines, grim and ragged with time ; full of pallid 
ferns and such dainty blossoms as love dark places ; tangled with 
a wild undergrowth, and ankle-deep with the crackling waste of 
past years ! Dense, damp, dark, stately old woodland, — I love 
all pines because of my early friendship with yours. Lying on 
the mouldy carpet of your waste verdure, I caught your whispers 
with the hidden sources of your growth, and watched you from 
my chamber-window as weird and wild you battled with storms. 
The whistlino; of a fierce winter's wind throui:;h a forest of pines 
is a mournful sound ; it seems like a prolonged wail of the per- 
secuted trees. No tree has a more striking mission than the 



THE FARM. 



61 



pine. It is the vanguard tree of nature. Grand, erect, beauti- 
ful, it enriches the low, sandy plain ; climbing, strong and ag- 
gressive, ever climbing, it lies prone against the mountain-side, 
clothing it with eternal verdure. There is something pathetic 
in the wild gesticulations of these brave trees, flinging out their 
stinted and shrunken arm-like branches in defiance to the winds ; 
stretching them back from the mountain-sides towards the valleys, 
until, planted among the clouds, they wax frigid and dumb and 
dead. 




mSE 




ACK through the green 
lane again to the old 
,L)/\ farm-hoube. I gently 
|)ush open a door which 
leads into a hall, wherein 
I have sported away many 
a day in childhood. At the other end of this hall is another 
door, through which came, forty years ago, the odor of sweet- 
Ijrier and honeysuckle. I tiptoe across the fragile floor and 
look out. Field-scents greet me, so familiar that I am almost 
dazed into believing that many things have not been, and that 
the dear old days have come back. Once a bench and basin 
stood beside this door, where tired laborers used to make them- 
selves tidy for their meals. Just beyond was a kitchen-garden, 
with a beehive close by, and a grindstone under a maple. Bench 
and basin, hive and stone are gone, and burdocks and plantain 

have taken the place of homely vegetables ; but the sapling little 
62 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 63 

Benny planted lias grown into a massive tree. Who would have 
thought to have tracked him after a lapse of more than forty 
years? Is this not a true spirit communion, — this catching 
glimpses, among the shadows of the long past, of dear faces 
which have not grown old; this wistful turning back towards 
the sunshine of our earlier days? 

My grandfather's kitchen was a sombre room, ceiled and 
painted brown; with huge beams, high dressers, and yawning 
fireplace. It had only two small windows, and was entered by 
nine doors. It was in reality the great hall of the house. What 
it lacked by day was light and sunshine. At night, brightened 
by a roaring backlog, it was full of cheer. Then its beams and 
ceilings and simple furnishings were enriched by shadows, and 
the pewter dishes upon its brown dressers shone in dancing 
firelight like silver. The two shelves, full of leather-covered 
books ; the weatherwise almanac, hanging from a peg ; the cross- 
legged table and prim chairs ; the long crane, with its hissing 
teakettle ; the brush ; the bellows ; the settle in the corner, and 
whatever else was there, all became fire-changed, and were mel- 
lowed into the bright scene. This room was by night the best 
part of the house. It was always the true heart of it ; that 
vital centre from which diverged its indwelling life. It was 
the place where people lounged and lingered. Because its small 
windows let in few sunbeams, those which did come in were all 
the more precious. Because it was full of homely things, and 
was, as the women said, '' most convenient," it had inwrought 
into it, as a picture, a quaint beauty of adaptation. Mellow, 



64 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



brown old kitcliens, — how many costly rooms simulate, in their 
furnishings, your inexpensive colors ! 

There was a dignity in the domestic labor of my grandfather's 
kitchen. Its w^orkers wrested from the humility of their voca- 
tion some measure of that beauty which 
would have been thrust upon them by 
more gracious conditions of life. Their 
daily walk was narrow : it was almost 
bounded by their kitchen ; but this latter 
was glorified by firelight and consecrated 
by use. The simple harmony of it, which 
has made it a charming thing of memory, 
was reflected upon these women. They 
became a part of it, and, as such, they 
are not drudges in plain garments, but 
quaintly-costumed life-studies in a picture 
of a delightful old room. 

I can see now my stately grandmother 
preparing her noontide meal. Her checked 
apron and muslin cap were spotlessly clean, and she handled 
her clumsy utensils with a becoming deftness. Hannah, the 
maid, hovered around, ready to lend a helping hand. The 
crane, hung with pots, kept up a constant sizzling, and covered 
pans spluttered from ember-heaps in the corner. There was 
no hurry, no bustle, no rattling of dishes. Hannah blew a tin 
horn from the back-door. There was a swashing at the little 
bench outside. The crane was swuno; out ; covers were lifted ; 




THE FARM-HOUSE. 65 

pans were taken Irom the corners ; with perfect order the dinner 
passed from the fire to the table, well cooked, sufficient, and 
wdiolesome. It was not daintily served, with cut-glass and 
china, but it was full of the essence of vitality, and had the 
merit of utter cleanliness. My grandmother presided over it 
with a serious dignity untaught by rules of etiquette ; and in 
no way was the discipline of her household better shown than 
by the utter decorum of its meals. 

The kitchen floor was white and worn with much scrubbina;, — 
hollows telling where its best seats by the hearth were. The 
doors opened into rare rooms : this one into a granite-walled 
dairy, as cool, clean, and compact as if it were cut fi'om the 
solid rock. The next led into the cellar, full of compartments 
and bins and dark closets, crammed in winter with farm prod- 
ucts. This storehouse never failed. Its apples were wild things, 
but toothsome, for they were the best from a great orchard, and 
one scented them from the stairway out of a long line of barrels. 
Nothing can quite equal for richness the flavor which a year's 
ripeness pours into a farm-house. It is only found in country 
homes, — this condensed sweetness, which has gone out of all the 
months of the year into the fashioning of the many things which 
were heaped and hoarded at the gathering in of the harvest. 

How fruits stored in old cellars kept their freshness ! That 
of one apple-tree in particular, at my grandfather's, never got 
its true ripeness until late in April. When first harvested it 
w^as crabbed, puckering the mouth. It was a tiny, bright fruit, 
profusely mottling its tree with crimson. It shrank and withered 



66 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

by keeping ; but it grew palatable in inverse ratio to its size. 
I remember a branch, broken off by accident, which carried its 
relish into the days of June. It was a pretty thing, hanging 
from the cellar-wall, — a hardy waif from the dead harvest of 
the past year. 

Two doors led into bedrooms, in which were chests of drawers 
full of homespun linen. Over the dairy ran the stairway, lead- 
ing to chambers severely simple in furnishing, but clean, and 
made bright by sunshine. The floors of these chambers were 
kept strewn with sand, — a cheap, changeful covering, which at 
night I used to scrawl over with skeleton pictures, to be scattered 
in the morning. 

The doors mostly opened with iron latches. These latches 
were clumsy things, lifting by a thumb-piece with a sharp click, 
and sending a shiver through one on frosty days. On the shed 
doors, made of wood, they were drawn up by the traditional 
bobbin. Brass knobs adorned the doors of the spare room. 
These were kept polished, and were held in high esteem. Their 
machinery, shut into a clumsy iron case, was screwed upon the 
outside of the door. As works of art none of these fastenings 
were much to 1:»e commended, but as quaint appendages to their 
homely doors were the best latches I have ever known. 

The west room was the family " keeping-room," also lighted 
up at night by a roaring backlog. The brush and bellows in 
this room were pretentious with green and gold, and the shovel 
and poker were headed with brass knobs ; but the fire was not 
a whit more cheerful than that in the brown kitchen. 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 



67 



I have sat hour after hour in that kitchen watchino- the 
backlog's slow consumption, lialf l^linding my eyes with its 
flickering brightness. It was a long-dying, companionable thing, 
taking strong hold upon a child's fancy. It had lieen dragged 
to its place in the early morning, snow-bound and shaggy. It 
was defiant of its fate, and fought against it through the whole 
day. It truly died by inches. From its ends sizzled and 
dropped its sap, — its true life-blood ; its substance fell off ring 
by ring ; its ashes settled slowly upon 
the hearth. Everybody hacked at ^,\x 

it ; it was constantly plied with shovel, ^^ 

tongs, and poker ; sparks flew fu- 
riously ; coals flaked off ; by degrees 
the log grew thin in the middle. 
At last a solid blow finished it; it 
snapped, and the parted ^j^^aejri-'fe.,,^ ^ 
ends fell without the 
iron dogs ; the brands 
were ready to be raked 
up ; the backlog was 
no more. Its life was 
jocund and brilliant. 
It was eloquent with 
fiery tongues, and the stories it told to a child, with crackling 
voice, went not out with its smoke. 

Farmers were not stingy with their fuel, for the brush in 
the woodlands grew faster than they could burn the ancient 




68 K^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

trees. My grandfather's backlogs were drawn through the house 
on a hand-sled, — snowy, mossy things, dripping with sap and 
shaggy with bark. They were buried in embers, and then sup- 
plemented with a forelog, which, in its own turn, was plied with 
lighter fuel and bolstered up with iron dogs. The building of 
this pile was an art ; and the practical farmer knew how to 
adjust the size of the log to the day's consumption, so that it 
was quite sure to shatter and break in season for the early 
" raking up" of the night. This " raking up" at my grand- 
father's was his own care ; and it was thought worthy of note 
in an almanac, when, once upon a time, his coals had failed to 
keep, and a fresh supply was brought from a neighbor's half 
a mile away. The ashes of those ancient wood-fires were full 
of virtue. They went to leach in spring for the making of 
family soap, and spread their richness far and wide over hungry 
fields. 

The west room of the old farm-house was most cheerful in 
long winter evenings ; not made so by social life or by artificial 
adornments, but rather by a sweet peace, and by the rich gifts 
of its outlying world. With face flattened against its window- 
panes, I, a nature-loving child, peered out at the glittering mill- 
pond and the dark woodland ; traced the thread of a highway ; 
caught the ,sound of transient bells ; made friends with snow 
and clouds and shadows, and came to love its wild winter scenery. 
Without a love for nature, life in this isolated farm-house through 
the winter months, to one unused to it, must have been lonely 
and monotonous. In February, when the lane almost daily filled 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 69 

with snow, my grandfather opened a highway through the " upper 
field." This was more easily kept clear, but it tailed to entice 
many comers. People hugged their firesides through winter 
snows, and learned to be content. There was a largeness about 
the home-life of ancient well-to-do country people. Tliey had 
space, great houses, and great rooms ; and if they had little 
show, they had at least no shams. Their houses needed lew 
furnishings, because so much embellishment was given to them 
by nature. Through many years, vivid and beautiful, have 
stood bv me the rare adornments of my grandfather's great 
house. They were skies and woods and water and far-off hills 
let in through its windows ; the shifting aspects, of winter snows 
and summer verdure ; and many especial revelations from earth 
and sky. It was a great house, so large that its uncarpeted 
chambers gave back an echo to my footsteps ; and I never went 
up to its garret, which I did seldom and softly, without a feeling 
of loneliness. This garret was a weird place, with shelves and 
scaffolds packed with the waste of years, and its beams hung 
with dried herbs. It was dimly lighted by two small gable 
windows, and at the head of the stairway was cut in two by a 
rambling old chimney. More than any other spot in the house 
it had the air of age and decay. Its dealings appeared to be 
wholly with the past, and things out of which life had gone. 
All that was in it looked as if it had belona-ed to another cen- 
tury ; and herbs filled the air with a sickish, musty smell. It 
was so far away from the living-rooms that few sounds of busy 
in-door life ever reached it. It was a gray ghost of a chamber, 

10 



70 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

in which nobody had ever hved ; a sort of burial-place for worn- 
out and faded things. It was delightful to come down from it 
into the brighter rooms, which seemed, all of them, to be per- 
vaded by some savory odor. Dried lavender and rose-leaves 
sent out their scents from chests and drawers ; the dairy, the 
cellar, the cheese-room had each their own flavor ; and the best 
essence of every edible seemed to disengage itself over the 
open fire. Johnny-cakes baked in the corner ; pies cooked in 
the oven ; meat roasted on the spit ; potatoes boiled in pots ; 
and from them all into the room came appetizing steams. 

The old folks talked but little in winter evenings. My grand- 
mother's knitting- work dropped stitches now and then, which 
she drowsily picked up with an "Oh, dear suz!" My grand- 
lather, sitting opposite to her, by one corner of the hearth, 
dozed, with the ruddy firelight mocking at his wrinkles. Across 
them Ijoth, on the chest of drawers, on the bed-curtains, on 
the tall clock, on the white walls, danced this same firelight ; 
out through the small panes it streamed over the waste of snow 
into the highway, cheering the cold traveller ; bright, beautiful 
home-light. Peaceful, long-seeming, dreamy winter evenings, 
vou made one used to the sighing of winds, the roaring of 
storms, the cold glitter of snow^ ; and you taught one, through 
isolation, to find how much there is that is beautiful and satis- 
fving to be gotten out of the roughest aspects and moods of 
nature ; you also taught how simple may be the resources of a 
true home-life. 

The door on the other side of the front entry opened into 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 71 

the east room. This was the '' best room," or, as my grand- 
father called it, the " fore" room. Most noticeable of its fur- 
nishing was the bed, — more for show than use. It was a tall 
structure, built up of corn-husks and feathers, not to be leaned 
against or carelessly indented. Its blue and white checked 
canopy, edged with knotted fringe, suspended by hooks from 
the ceiling, was spun and dyed and wTjven by the women of 
the household. Every piece of linen they used was of their 
own make. A pillow-case from that house is marked in plain 
letters A. D., meaning Abigail Drake, who spun and wove it 
there more than eighty years ago. The letters are stitched in 
with yellow silk (it must once have been black) after an ancient 
sampler. This sampler was a curious thing, running through 
the alphabet and numerals in several texts and various-colored 
silks, punctuated at the end by two skeleton birds, and winding 
up with this wise maxim, " Industry is its own reward." It 
also announced in written text that Abigail Drake, at the age 
of twelve, in such a year, wrought this sampler. 

Such samplers were worked by girls in the village schools. 
Their letters were pricked in and out with extreme care, and 
the best executed of them were generally framed and hung in 
the fore room. They were as precious to those who made them 
as if they had been rare water-colors, and the measure of a 
young woman's accomplishment was taken from the skill with 
which she had done this task. As rags, these old samplers 
are worthless now ; as the faded work of bright young girls 
of a past century, they interest one ; for they are fabrics into 



72 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

which, in long ago summer days, were inwrought some of the 
old-fashioned simplicity and patience and industry of a dead 
generation. 

My grandfather's flax was of good grain. Its bed w^as just 
inside of the pasture-bars, making a dainty show of blue blos- 
soms. There could be nothing prettier in the way of flowers 
than it was. Waving in the wind, it seemed like a bit of summer 
sky let dow^n. It was tended with great care, and harvested 
and made ready for use with much labor. Failure of the crop 
by untoward weather, or any mishap in its preparation, was 
looked upon as a great misfortune. 

In lone; summer afternoons my orrandmother and Hannah 
planted their little wheels by the back-door, and hour after 
hour drew out the pliant threads which were to be woven, in 
the loom up-stairs, into variously patterned coverlets, table- 
cloths, and towels. One is touched in handling, at this remote 
day, the fabrics fashioned by these ancient women. It seems 
as if they had woven into them a warp and woof of their own 
vitality, and that the strength which went out of the patient 
workers entered into their webs, and gave to them a texture 
of beauty and endurance. This old farm-house pillow-case of 
mine is as firm as if its fibre had been plucked from the flax- 
Ijed but yesterday, and it is as lustrous as it was when the 
fingers Avhich wove it first cut it from the beam. To nothing 
does the past cling more than to such ancient cloths. The 
threads you handle, which moth and mildew have marred, are 
not the real thing; that is a finer undershot, impalpable to 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 73 

touch of stranger, but trailing down to you, like silken folds, 
glittering and precious with tenderest memories. 

How many operations of breaking and bleaching and boiling 
those home products had to go through before they came out 
at last faultless as the fruits of foreign looms ! The bureau, in 
the fore room, was always crammed with fine twined linens, 
white as snow, and scented with lavender and rose-leaves. How 
did those women accomplish so much ? I look back upon them 
wdth pride and wonder ; for my grandmother was no drudge : 
she was a true lady. Never was there a more dignified or better 
bred woman than she ; never the mistress of a more well-ordered 
household. She was never hurried, never behindhand with her 
work ; was given to hospitality, and was tasteful in her dress. 
Very few, in those days, were the complications of daily living ; 
still I marvel how my grandmother managed to be so cultivated 
and so elegant, and yet sit, hour after hour, at the loom, plying 
her shuttle with no less persistence than, in spinning, she drew 
out her threads. 

Across the huge beams, under and over each other, crossed 
and recrossed these threads, like a spider's web. I know by 
what manifold toil they were gotten there : by reeling, sizing, 
spooling, and warping, before my grandmother could begin to 
throw her shuttle. The work was slow, but it never flagged. 
Threads were broken and carefully taken up ; quills gave out, 
and were patiently renewed; the web grew, thread by, thread, 
inch by inch ; the intricate pattern came out upon the surface, 
and pleased the weaver's eye ; neighbors dropped in and gossiped 



74 



NJEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



over and about it. The days wore on ; the worker never failed 
at her beam; until, most. likely at the close of some long sum- 




mer's afternoon, the end of the warp was reached ; the treadles 
stopped ; the web was done. How^ delighted the women used 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 75 

to be with their woven fabric, so slowly constructed, so quickly 
unwound ! They stretched it out, clipped its hanging threads, 
held it up to the light, and stroked and caressed it as if it were 
a living thing. It would have been a mean web indeed had it 
brought them no high satisfaction. It may have been that 
spinning and weaving, l:)y long practice, grew to be a sort of 
unconscious mechanical process ; that the workers, in their long- 
hours of monotonous employment, were given to meditation ; 
and thus, from their double vocation, came perhaps that air of 
serious dignity common among the better class of farm-house 
women. 

Nothing could be more picturesque or prettier, in country life, 
than the little flax-wheel, with well-filled distaff', being plied in 
a shady doorway by comely matron or rosy lass. The loom, 
with its web and weaver, made a classic picture ; and its con- 
tinuous thud, sounding hour after hour from an upper room, 
was a symbol of that pathetic patience which entered so largely 
into the lives of workino; women. 

The lore room was seldom used. It was rather a store-room 
for liousehold treasures ; for such thino-s as had been bouo;ht 
with hard-earned money were highly prized bv these simple 
people. Its furniture was the costliest and most modern, as 
well as the ugliest, in the house. It was a sort of show-room. 
The china and glass in its cupboard were marvellously fine, and 
have come down as heirlooms. They are suggestive of the 
tendencies and tastes of women, who are traditionally most 
charming, through simplicity, because, from the force of their 



76 



NEW' ENGLAND BYGONES. 



condition, their lives could not be otherwise than simple. Their 
merit, therefore, is not so much in the fact that they lived so 
near nature, which they could not help doing, — that they took 
to themselves a beauty of which they knew not, — as that, while 
possessing the common instincts of woman, they bore burdens 
with heroic patience, and, through long, hard-worked lives, kept 









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1 




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-^•- 


^^& 


-■■ri: 


\ 


^.^& 


^ 




^^ _^im 


gl^ 


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se^t 



up a holiday simulation of that ease and luxury which was not 
their own. 

A narrow flight of stairs led, from the front entry, up to the 
guest-chambers. One of them was haunted. The ghost of this 
room was a harmless thing. A child of the house, Oily by name, 
had been found crushed in the woodland by a fallen tree. It 
was so long ago that his little grave had sunk far below its 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 77 

fellows ; yet his memory had been kept fresher than the turf 
above it by the legend of this east chamber. Its furnishina;s 
were quaint and homely : a huge oaken chest of drawers, rush- 
bottomed chairs, and a low bedstead hung with checked In'own 
and white linen. Between the two front windows was a looking- 
glass in a queer little frame, with a silhouette picture of my 
grandfather and grandmother on either side of it. In a cup- 
board by the chimney was a set of fine china, painted in flowing 
blue. 

In through its windows came the eternal, ever-shifting glory 
of the outlying landscape. As I looked out of these windows 
on summer mornings, my heart grew full, like a heart touched 
by love, so profuse in variety and beauty was the scenerv of this 
wild, lonely s{)ot. 




11 




SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 



There is no end to the coquetry of a New England spring. 
Some early March morning you look out upon a waste of snow. 
You are weary of 'it; you long to see life and growth and verdure 
come into the dead landscape. Old winter flings Lack against 
the pane scuds of snow and sleet. Then come dark days, clinging 
mists and warm rains, trying to patience and evil for invalids. 
Little water channels, with a melancholy gurgle, undermine the 
snow-banks. There is everywhere a gradual subsidence of sur- 
face. Tops of tall rocks peep out ; highways get to be wellnigh 
impassable ; cellars grow wet ; brooks begin to roar and rivers 
78 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 79 

to rise ; there is a universal sizzling and steaming. This grizzly, 
dispiriting commotion is the birth-throe of spring. Shortly the 
mossy housetops begin to smoke ; the fields and pastures are full 
of bare knolls and patches ; fences, which have been winter- 
buried, once more zigzag through the landscape, and dark lines 
mark the lanes and highways. Leaf-buds swell, and the frosts 
of the night melt l)elbre the morning sunshine. Little boys 
trundle their sap-buckets through the pastures, and you see 
that the yearly marvel of verdure is being inwrought into the 
branches and twigs of the bare forests. Another season of seed- 
time and harvest will be born unto you. 

Chimney corners are deserted ; farmers begin to bestir them- 
selves. They sort over their seeds, put in repair their farm 
utensils, and, before they get fully harnessed to their out-of-door 
work, attend to their town affairs. What country-bred boy or 
girl does not remember that yearly meeting, when all the voters 
of the town swarmed about its great, bare hall, and cast into 
the ballot-box those tickets the making up of which had cost 
months of logic in the village stores and much hard feeling 
among honest neighbors ? All the children were politicians that 
day ; and the moderator, generally chosen for his loud voice, was 
as distinguished to them as if he had been made President of the 
whole republic. The elective process was a slow one ; often so 
hotly contested that the count for representative to General 
Court was hardly reached at nightfall. The little boys who 
peddled molasses candy (most of it badly burned) gave out the 
bulletins of its progress. The slumpy drifts had to be cut down 



80 J^J^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

beforehand to make the roads passable, over which, when their 
votes were needed, the feeble old men were taken at the ex- 
pense of their party. The breaking up of the meeting was 
shown, to waiting housewives, by the thickening on the high- 
way of returning farmers, most of them laden with budgets 
of gingerbread and candy. The women were as anxious for 
news as if there had been a great battle, and the zest of the 
day, to the children, was only surpassed by that of the annual 
muster. 

This muster, or " training day," as it was more often called, 
was their best holidav, when the militia was drilled in a vacant 
lot of some fortunate town. What child ever forgot that show 
when once seen ? As an early experience or a remembered 
picture, what could surpass it ? How real the soldiers were with 
their muskets and bright uniforms ! What a great man the 
captain was! And the drum-major, who ever saw his like? 
What a marvel of discipline the soldiers showed ! what uniformity 
of step ! what skill in evolution ! what success of officers in 
horsemanship ! All day long they went through their drills, 
and the gaping crowd stared and marvelled, half taking this 
play for a real thing and these men for true soldiers. Before 
daylight, from the country miles around, wagons full of living 
freight began to pour into the field, until it was half packed with 
sight-seers. These wagons were drawn close up by the wall as 
a safe place for the girls and younger children. The unharnessed 
horses, to be kept quiet with hay, were tied close by, and the 
larger boys got astride the wall or climbed into neighboring 



SPUING- TIME AND HAYIN(^. SI 

trees. Booths were put up, and pedlers' carts stood thick in 
an inner ring. Gingerbread and candy were the staple articles 
of trade, with such bright gauds as would be likely to catch an 
uncritical eye. It was the custom for lasses to receive presents 
on this day, and because of this many a hard-earned penny was 
foolishly spent. It was amusing to see the plain farmers going 
about with their red bandanna handkerchiefs (show things) full 
of gingerbread, the extent of their day's dissipation. It was good 
gingerbread, with a sort of training flavor, which died out with 
the giving up of the custom of the day. At noon, when the 
soldiers dispersed for dinner, the most adventurous boys followed 
the great officers to the tavern, and looked in at the windows 
to see them eat, whispering to each other of the prowess of these 
dangerous men. It was not considered respectable for young 
girls to wander about among the crowd, so they lunched in the 
wagons, or on the greensward by them, and their nooning was 
the harvest of the dealers in gingerbread. 

The climax of the drill was the firine off of the o-uns, which 
brought many an urchin down from his perch as quickly as if he 
had been shot in the head. Unbred horses did not relish the 
day, and were constantly making little side stampedes, no less 
exciting than the drill itself. A shower took all the feather 
and glory out of the show, and sent soldiers flying in front of 
the crowd. Before nightfall parties got mixed. Soldiers mistook 
themselves lor citizens, and citizens forgot the deference due to 
soldiers. It was generally growing to be truly warlike, when 
at order of the great captain the trainers, led by music of bugle 



82 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and drum, marched magnificently from the fiel(L The crowd 
waited. Men, women, and children seemed to devour with their 
eyes this departing glory; this toy pageant, which had given 
them a merry day ; this mock soldiery, which had stimrdated 
patriotic virtue; this thing, wdiich was not foolish Ijecause it 
was so real to them. When it had fairly passed out of sight 
each went his and her own way, and, almost before the drum 
had stop})ed playing its marching tune, the field was deserted. 

By the first of May morning sunshine begins to have power, 
and through your windows comes the gladsome gush of spring 
birds. The Iniried life of nature has burst its cerements ; the 
earth is mellowing ; trees are leaving, and sods are waiting to 
be turned. Here and there, under the shady side of fences 
or on distant hill -tops, lie strips of dingy snow. You do not 
mind them, for your feet walk over crisp mosses and tender 
grass ; you rustle aside last year's perished leaves for arbutus, 
and close beside these same snow-strips you find violets. Anon 
the landscape grows picturesque w^ith the blue frocks and red 
shirts of farm laborers, with ploughs and bonfires and oxen 
and children and slowly-moving carts. 

To the farmer there seems to be no end to spring labor. 
Sowing and planting over, the upspringing seed is to be care- 
fidly watched and tended. Each day brings its weight of ever- 
varying cares. The New England farmer of moderate means 
truly gets his bread by the sweat of his brow. The vegetables 
and grains, which make up so large a portion of his fare, are 
raised by dint of prudent forecast, and the bringing to bear 



:SPliING-TIME AND HAYING. 



83 



of much practical pliilosophy upon stingy soil. In the spring, 
my grandiather and his one man-servant, with an occasional 
day of foreign help, were equal to the work of the farm. But 
in haying-time, thrice a day, a score or more of stout-limbed 




laborers gathered around my grandfather's board, and the cup- 
board in the brown kitchen groaned under its weight of hearty 
viands. Sudden showers brought over willing neighbors, and 
now and then a traveller would stop a day or two to lend a 



<S4 NEW ENGLAND JlVdoNE^. 

helping hand. My grandmother held these '" transients" in low- 
esteem. 

These old New England farmers were apt to he "close" with 
their money. Who could blame them if they were ? The gains 
of most of them came by slow accretions, and their lives were 
at warfare with the elements. They were generous in personal 
service, and where they would grudgingly give you a penny, 
they did not hesitate to use their strength for you. They were 
watcliful to help with your exposed harvest, and they pitched 
and i)ulled and tuo;o;ed and sweat for you without thought of 
reward. They were a well-informed class. Seed planting and 
hoeing their corn and potatoes, in dusty and uncouth attire, 
they seemed like patient animals. In talking with them one 
was astonished at their intelligence, begotten of their application 
and their dealings with nature. They had been well taught 
geography, grammar, and arithmetic. If a broad provincialism 
marred their speech, it was not because they knew little of the 
construction of language. They were apt with rules, and were 
better versed in the laws, which ought to have moulded their 
words, than many men and women of politer tongue. They 
were learned in whatever pertained to their craft, only that 
their knowledge was marred bv a certain obstinate credulity. 
Students of almanacs, they became weatherwise from watching 
the clouds. Clinging to the traditions of their fathers, they 
were still not unskilful chemists for the soils which made u|» 
their own farms. Thev learned from practice the right rotation 
of crops, and thriftily turned their farm-waste into food for their 



8PRING-TIME AND HAYING. 85 

fields. They cared little for trees or shrubs or flowers, but readilv 
fenced out for the housewife a sunny garden-patch. Weeds in- 
fested their fields and marred their crops ; children trampled 
down their grass ; thieving birds pecked at their corn and grain. 
They were a much-tried race, with sun and wind as often working 
them ill as good, yet they kept their courage and tempers mar- 
vellously well. Eough, with an undercurrent of softness ; not 
cultivated yet wise ; nursed by nature and led by Bible pre- 
cepts ; above all they pleased you by the healthy content with 
which they accepted their condition. 

In winter, sitting on wooden benches by the stoves of country 
stores, they used to discourse and take counsel together. They 
much loved discussion, and party spirit ran high. Affairs of town 
and State and nation were handled with rude but close logic. 
These stores were queer places, full of all sorts of commodities, 
smelling strong of codfish, molasses, and snuff, and too often of 
New England rum. In long summer afternoons the humbler class 
of farmers' wives went to them to exchange dairy products for 
dry goods and groceries. A fresh supply of " storekeepers' " 
wares made a great stir. The women overlooked and talked 
about the meagre stock, and strung washed samples of its calicoes 
upon their window-sills to dry. They used to go past mv 
grandfather's, to the store beyond the miller's red cottage, with 
wooden ^oxes tied up in squares of white cotton. These were 
full of butter. The more opulent of them drove clumsy wagons 
filled with various farm products good for barter. 

Simple shoppers, but makers of rare bargains, inasmuch as 

12 



86 JVJ^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the stuffs yon bought brought you solid comfort and true de- 
hght. They washed well and wore well, and the silk and sheen, 
which were not in their real texture, were imparted to them 
l)y the satisfaction which you had in them. Country maidens 
fitted their calicoes with care, and wore them with exquisite 
neatness. If they overrated the fineness, the dyes, and the l)e- 
comingness of the fabrics, it was because their color blindness 
and their worldly ignorance helped them to be made satisfied 
and happy by very little things. They were as acceptable to 
each other and to their sweetheai-ts in calico as they -would 
have l)een, fashion taught, in silks and laces. 

The candies of these stores w^ere the delight of cliildren. The 
red and white hearts shut u|) in dingy, brass-mouthed jars were 
in reality stale, l)ut to the buyers of them the freshness which 
they lacked was given to them by their rarity. 

The keepers of the stores, having leisure, were apt to be men 
of much intelligence. I found one of them, on an August day, 
sitting just outside his shop, his chair tilted back against the 
wall, so wrapped up in a. translation of Homer's Iliad that he 
had no ear for a bargain. His recreation only illustrated, what 
is ever true of country life, that it holds in silence and humility 
many thinkers. This store was perched upon a hill, in an out- 
of-the-way place. All the inhabitants of the little village seemed 
to be either at work or play in its adjoining fields. He sat there 
alone, an old man, tall, massive, white-haired, his face beneficent 
with the peace of an untroubled life. He peered from over his 
iron-ljound spectacles, keeping his place in his book with his 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 87 

forefinger, and answered my questions in an al)stracted way, as 
if I were a bother to him. He was a beautiful picture of a 
vigorous happy old age. The pomps and vanities and vexations 
of society were nothing to him, and yet he was consorting 
with the best; and the glory of intellect and of age, and the 
bright splendor of the summer's day, wrapped him about like a 
garment. 

The rum of those country stores made terril)le drunkards, 
whose vices and idiosyncrasies were brought out, by their isola- 
tion, "with clear-cut distinctness. Their wives were white-faced, 
hopeless women ; their houses were dismal with the signs of a 
drunkard's unthrilt. The whole tragedy was so plainly stamped 
that he who ran might read. No home was ever so little of a 
home as that of a drunkard in the country ; no life ever seemed 
so utterly unnatural, so warped a life as his. The verv Ijlessings 
of his inheritance mocked at him. Space and quiet and sun- 
shine and verdure, and every other thing which especially marks 
country life, only made more apparent his poverty and degra- 
dation. One could always tell the home of a drunkard, with 
its clapboards and shingles slipping off; its windows stuffed with 
rags ; its unhinged doors ; its tumbling outbuildings, shattered, 
ragged, leaning, tottering, solemn with the unutterable pathos 
of a lost life. 

If you have never lived in the country, you can have no 
idea what grim and strange and repulsive spectacles these men 
become, on the surface of its pure, calm, undemonstrative life. 
I recall three who, on town-meeting and training days, used 



88 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

to stagger up and down the highways. Children shrank from 
them as if they had been lepers. One of them had children 
of his own, who grew up rough and wicked, and became the 
outlaws of the neighborhood ; to whom the fair landscape was 
only a field for plunder, and against whom the hearts of all 
the village people seemed to be turned. God forgive them! 
circumstance was hard upon them, — they were only drunkard's 
children. 

Another was once possessed of a brilliant intellect. Poor, lost 
man ! his house was the forlornest of all ; perched high on a 
liill, tumbling, and fluttering w^ith rags. His large and once 
valuable farm was overrun with brambles. His wife was never 
seen outside her wretched home. Her existence grew to be a 
sort of myth. She died and was buried, and no one missed 
her. 

Jim, who danced in his cups, was foolish and diverting to 
the voungsters; still his antics seemed disgustingly uncouth in 
the decorous quiet of a country town. 

When a young child, I went to the sale of a drunkard's home 
with the lawyer who had the foreclosure of a mortgage upon 
it. If I live to be a hundred years old I shall never forget that 
sale. The place had once been a fruitful one, and had come 
down from father to son through several generations. Drunk- 
enness had wrested it from the hands of him from whom it was 
to be sold. The man's wife was a handsome but heart-broken 
woman. I shall never behold a look of more utter despaii" than 
that which lier face wore that dav. It was a harsh scene : I 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 89 

see and hear it all, — the mocking sunbeams ; the loud voice of 
the auctioneer ; the coarse laughter of the crowd ; the woman, 
pacing the floor, sighing, never speaking, and as ghastly as if 
she had been among the dead. The final bid came. With one 
wail she went out of the room, and I never saw her more. 

The processes by which the year brings about her miracles 
are full of beauty. The humblest farm laborer can take no 
working posture which will not be picturesque, framed into a 
spring landscape. I recall the grain-sower flinging broadcast 
his seed ; Irolicksome urchins dropping the sprouting bulbs ; 
bonfires from last year's stubble and hew clearings, giving l^rown 
shadow to outlying verdure. Hoeing and ploughing and carting 
and cutting and digging ; the men who worked, and the works 
they fashioned, were moulded into the earth's form and sub- 
stance. It was as if the country were an ever-shifting kalei- 
doscope, constantly changing old forms and hues into new shades 
and shapes. 

Its marvels began with the breaking up of V)rooks, when they 
started to roar and tumble and overflow their banks. The fish, 
which at night flashed by in these spring waters, gave a tran- 
sient sport to men and boys, who sought for them by light of 
pitchpine torches. Flitting about with nets and spears, in the 
uncertain blaze of their bonfires, their loud shouts heard above 
the roaring of the stream, they gave a weird aspect to the val- 
ley; a charming exaggeration of the untamed scenery of early 
spring-time. 

Nothing gives more expression to a field or pasture than one 



9U 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



of these brooks. Its wonders never cease. Its spring fiirv and 
overflow last but a few days. It is, in fact, a most placid thing, 
ri[)[)ling over smooth pebl)les or pliant grass, pure, transparent, 
and enticing. It is prettiest when running, in and out its tor- 




tuous way, through pasture-knolls, full of rocky lords, its banks 
rich with ferns and wild flag and orchis, — or, better still, through 
the heart of an old wood, where it grows mysterious, and hugs 
to its soggy sides such plants as love shade and moisture. A 
brook is one of the friendliest, sweetest things you can stumble 
upon in your wanderings ; and the one which you first knew is 



SPUING- TIME AND HAYING. 91 

remembered with much tenderness, — the dense woodland from 
whence it came ; the ferns and pallid grass, which were half 
dragged out with it; the pebbly bed, into which it widened; 
the dark pool, beloved by trout ; the show of coltsfoot, beset 
by housewives; the sharp-pointed rocks, which helped you over; 
the patch of orchis, and the long stretch of rushes ; the mint 
and the bog onions, — but why go on ? lor this babbler was my 
l>rook and not yours ! 

As the season wore on grasses grew stout and tall ; heavy 
showers lodged them ; and truant boys, and girls made unthrifty 
paths through the fields. Farmers began to whet their scythes 
and plant their grindstones under shady trees ; sure signs of 
coming haying. The delights of those hayings have outlasted 
years, and the aroma of them still pervades every ripened field. 
Time has not changed the teeming life of nature. When I see 
little heads, bobbing up and down in yonder meadow yellow 
with buttercups, I rememljer that strawberries used to grow 
where buttercups blossomed. New shadows are chasing each 
other over ripening grain ; familiar fruits lie everywhere ; the 
forest-trees, just as they used, overlap each other with shaded 
folds of intense verdure. Fulness of sunshine falls everywhere 
on fulness of vegetation. Back to me, through the features of 
the present, come memories of the past. 

Late in June I hear a familiar sound, — the sharp click of a 
scythe making a beginning of the mid-year harvest. The year 
is waxing old. The vellow stubble of the first mown field tells 
that ; and it has a suggestive desolateness. What odor so sweet 



92 NEW ENGLAXD BYGONES. 

as that of new-mown hay? It is tlic ])reath of the dving grass, 
of which there is no wisp so small that, when I sever it, it shall 
not send forth this delicious scent to tell me of bygone days 
of abundant and beautiful harvests. 

Of all the waste luxuriance which the earth pours forth in 
her yearly ripening, this is the most beautiful and beautifying. 
Lying broadcast u|)on fields, threading them in careless wind- 
rows ; flung together in heaps ; traihng from Lidened carts ; 
crowning oxen and Laborers with fantastic wreaths ; in whatever 
place it finds or flings itself, it is the same dehghtful, sweet- 
scented, dying grass. There is no earth so flat, no landscape 
so tame, that its yearly hay harvest shall not undulate it into 
lines of beauty. Up and down the dusty highway, jolting al)Out 
uneven fields, the homely carts used to go, gathering up their 
precious loads, slowly wreathing their rails and wheels and 
shafts, 

I can see my grandfithei' wiping the sweat fi'om his brow, 
and curiously eying the sky, — treacherous sky, playing pranks 
with the best plans and labors, but all-creative in putting new 
life into a siunmer landscape. Piling up, snow-white, these clouds 
come, some hot August afternoon, out of the horizon, very beau- 
tiful at first, but treacherous, and the dread of hay-makers. 
They at once define their edges with a soft-tinted rose color, 
and grow apace. They roll on, with stately march, towards 
the zenith, right over the anxious workers and waiting harvests. 
Growing angrv, getting lurid, overlapping each other with l:)razen 
folds, threatening, they sound their warning of low-muttered 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 



93 



thunder, condense their brightness into vivid lightning, and the 
whole sky grows dense and black with pent-up waters. 

Farmers used to fly to each other's aid at such times, runnino; 
like bees about the fields, goading and urging on their laa;o'ard 




oxen, — Broad and Bright and Cherry and Star. Carts strained 
and groaned like living things ; clouds flew higher and higher ; 
little children tugged in the eati'er race ; the hav blew out in 
long streamers with the wild winds ; the scurrving drops came 
thicker and thicker ; the storm burst at last ; when, as if by 

13 



94 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

magic, men and oxen and teams vanished, and the wind and 
rain had their way with the ;iiown and unmown grasses left in 
the fields. 

The noonings were bright features of a haying landscape. At 
summons of horn, away went the workers through lanes and 
highways to their noontide meal. More often, to save time, 
they took it in the field. I see and hear it all,— men stretching 
their brawny limbs upon the hay-heaps ; oxen chewing the new- 
mown grass under shadow of their loads; barefooted boys and 
girls scudding about with lunch-pails and pitchers ; the drone 
of bees ; the chirrup of grasshoppers ; the babbling of the brook ; 
the lapping of the mill-pond ; and many undertones of nature 
brought out by the unusual quiet of this hour. Oh the peace, 
the glory, given by those summer noonings to the tired bodies 
and cramped souls of working men ! AVhether they knew it or 
not, something of the fervor of the meridian sunshine, some- 
thing of the earnestness of the mid-day nature, something of 
the fulness of the mid-year harvest went into them, through 
their senses, and bore fruit in thankfulness and patience. Some- 
thing of the narrowness of their ordinary lives went out of them 
unawares. 

The nooning over, bustle again prevailed. There was no 
faltering, no let up, until the horn gave notice of the evening 
meal. Then, through lanes and highway, fields let out their 
workers, who cheered their homeward way with simple talk. 
They went over the day's labors ; forecasted the sky, and planned 
the toils of the morrow; prone all to the rest of the coming 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 



95 



night. Into the barns were shoved the ladened racks, to be 
emptied in the early morning; down into the west sank the 
sun ; over the beautiful creation of the harvest fell the older 
beauty of night ; and unto weariness, and to the patience of 
labor, past and to come, floated, with noiseless motion, sweet, 
dreamless, strength-giving sleep. 




^X%%M-\^fy.. 







3 were would - l:)e liayniakers, 
Benny and I, jogging along 
with Jonathan the man-servant 
in an old market -wagon, to- 
wards our grandfather's farm. 
As remembered, we made a 
homely load, but a happy one. We were half wild with joy, 
and chattered like magpies all the way about our promised 
delights. 

The whole universe was ours that day. We were not simply 
wayfarers to our grandfather's farm, but travellers at large ; 
and the narrow circle of the horizon seemed as vast to us as 
the belt of the whole continent would now. We felt well ; and 
if, in passing, travellers eyed us sharply, we were sure that they 



THE VISIT. 



97 



knew us for young haymakers. It never occurred to us that 
our equipage was unusuah The only fault we found was with 
the slowness of our pace and the jolting of the springless wagon; 
but the one gave our quick eyes a chance to spy out way-side 
wonders, and the other sent the blood into our cheeks. I am 
quite sure that we had a better time than we should have had 
with my grandfather's pretentious 
chaise and one of his smarter 
horses. 

I can see now the yellow lilies 
we counted among the pines that 
day. I have loved yellow lilies 
ever since. They were cheertul 
things to a — 

child's eye, gleaming out 
from an old forest. They were 
almost as pretty alongside the front 
door -steps of unpainted country- 
houses, where they paled 
somewhat, multiplied, 
and grew in clumps ; 
whereas in the forest 
each blossom stood by itself 
in flaunting brightness, and seemed 
to come out of the wood to meet you. 

The country through which we passed on our journey was 
sparselv settled, and mostly covered with a thin forest of old 




98 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

pines. This forest was full of a shaggy undergrowth of scrub- 
oaks and knolls of low huckleberry-bushes. The day was hot, 
and everything glowed with sunlight. In vain we turned oui' 
umbrella this way and that. Its whalebones creaked ; the sun's 
rays pierced straight through it, past our straw hats, into our 
little brains; and we settled down, only to have our shoulders 
half baked by the high wagon-back. The sand of the road-side 
glittered ; the wheel-tires sank into it and came up hot and 
bright. Each stone was a reflecting mirror, and the business 
of every leaf and twig seemed to be to absorb and send forth 
heat. The quiet was so perfect that the slightest crackle of a 
twig was distinctly heard. Yet, underlying this glare and seem- 
ing silence was a certain positive procession of sound. 

We shut our eyes from sheer weariness, and were lulled to 
sleep by this soft drone of living, growing, ever-renewing nature. 
You country-livers know what this voice is, which has no alphabet, 
no written language, but which is nevertheless an all-pervading, 
thrilling monotone, best rendered in what are called her solitudes. 
Benny said he could hear things grow ; and surely the wise little 
head both saw and heard many beautiful things that day. 

So we young haymakers were not ashamed of the springless, 
rattling old market-wagon. Neither were we ashamed of Jona- 
than, with his homespun clothes and leathern whip, chewing 
his cud like an ox, and shouting to his horse with a never-ending 
" git ap." This horse was not a fine-looking beast. She was a 
true farm-horse, broad-backed and round-sided, carrying her 
head low, with a shaggy mane. She was old and not ambitious, 



THE VISIT. 99 

pacing along, at the rate of five miles an hour, with a lumbering 
gait which gave a double jolt to the clumsy wagon. She was, 
however, to be respected for her age and her safety ; and, known 
by the name of Betsy, had been for almost thirty years carefully 
tended by the family of which she was a true member. New 
England farmers were all. merciful to their beasts of burden, and 
this kindness was a natural expression of the ingrained justice 
of their natures. 

But one horse in the neighborhood was older than this one 
of my grandfather's, and that belonged to the aged minister of 
the parish. His horse, roaming at large, was as much a feature 
of the village landscape as its meeting-house or its school-house. 
It grew into the history and the traditions of the place. It was 
an unaggressive, harmless animal, and came to hold a sort of 
feeble kinship with all the villagers. When an absentee asked 
after the townspeople and their affairs, he also asked after the 
parson's horse ; and thus the unwitting beast came to be a repre- 
sentative of an enlarged humanity. This horse, long toothless 
and fed upon porridge, was so defiant of mortality that, out of 
sheer compassion, it was slain at last outside the village. I 
verily believe that the young men and maidens of the parish 
who had grown up during the lifetime of this dumb creature, 
and were used to the constant sight of it by the way-side, 
mourned the loss of the " parson's horse" with almost a sen- 
timent of human friendship. 

The Betsy of my grandfather's must have come of hardy 
stock, for she, too, outlived for several years her usefulness, 



100 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



and wandered during the summer, a hobbling, gray pensioner, 
upon the shore of the mill-pond, where one day she was found 
stark and stiff, close by the old boat. She used, when past 
service, to limp up to the ])asture-bars and lean her old head 



Mm, 






^ \\r^ if" 







upon the upper rail, giving us children a sort of blear-eyed 
recognition which was quite touching. To see this head bobbing 
up and down amongst the far-off alder-bushes was as pathetic 
to our child-hearts as if the poor creature could have talked and 
reasoned with us. We were glad when she gave up the ghost 



THE VISIT. 101 

in a natural Avay, for my grandfather could not consent to have 
her killed. 

Benny and I did not after all make a very mean appearance 
on our first visit alone to our grandfather's farm. We were 
only two untaught children going to a haying. Our equipage 
and our dress were suited to our calling. We were Ijent on a 
kindly errand,— we were to carry youth and cheerfuhiess, and 
so joy, into the great lonely house of an old man. Being imagi- 
native children, and having little book learning, that which we 
desired to believe, and which fact failed to give us, we coined 
out of our own brains. The seven-mile sandy plain, with its 
pines and dwarf-oaks, we declared to be no less than forty miles 
long ; whilst a moderate-sized pond Benny confidently whispered 
behind Jonathan's back could be no other than the Dead Sea 
itself. Yet this simple-hearted Benny was over-wise for his 
years about everything which could be coaxed by search and 
observation from the outlying landscape of his home, and he 
was, besides, a charming young romancer. It is delightful to 
go back to one's days of just such fresh-hearted credulity. Some 
of our childhood faiths mav have been very foolish indeed, but 
many of them were beautiful, and we are tender of them all in 
memory in after-years. We can afford to lose none of them, 
for these same foolish beliefs were wise to us once, and swelled 
the sum of our earthly joys. 

In my grandfather's time, when railroads had not permeated 
Eastern New England, a long journey was an epoch in a child's 
life ; and that was called such which was accomplished by several 

14 



102 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

days of slow-paced travel. It was made a subject for private 
devotion and public prayer. " Our brother and sister about to 
go on a long journey" became marked people in the parish. 
Neighbors "dropped in of evenings" to talk the matter over; 
and it was dreamed about and wrought for many weeks before- 
hand. The finest fabrics of the house were set aside and shaped 
over for that child who was going to Boston, or perhaps to some 
nearer town ; to whom most likely was given especial and lighter 
tasks, as one upon whom the unction of travel had already lallen. 
The night before the start was a busy one in the farm-house. 
Many last stitches were to be taken, and the bandbox or small 
trunk to be packed by the careful mother. The child's ward- 
robe, made for the occasion, was meagre, but clean and strong. 
It was the best the farm had to give, and was fine to the wearer. 
I can see Farmer Brown starting off with his daughter Sally, 
bound for Boston, just as he started over forty years ago. He 
was a well-to-do farmer, homely, but shrewd and honest, and 
had held high places of town trust. How exactly he is recalled ! 
His broad collar seems to cut his ears with its sharp edges, and 
his stock clasps his neck like a vice. His blue-black homespun 
suit has been long made, but well kept, and its showy buttons 
are of double gilt. Sally's frock is of store calico, with a white 
ruffle in the neck. The shawl she wears, of some printed pongee 
stuff, is a family heirloom, which her grandmother wore before 
her. Her bonnet, too gay and too small for her, has just come 
from Boston, a gift from her seldom-seen uncle, who now and 
then thrusts a town gaud upon this neglected country relative. 



THE VISIT. 



103 



The family of this uncle they are going to visit. The innocent 
souls have not waited for an invitation. With them the instinct 
of kinship is as strong as their faith in their religion. For six 
months the mother's busy brain and fingers have toiled over 
fine twined threads of wheel and loom, to weave for this young 




girl an outfit suitable for this great occasion. She is a blithe- 
some lass, just grown uj), and is engaged to teach the village 
school. 

They climb into the lumbering wagon. The younger children 
swarm about them, whilst the dear mother stands in the doorway 
with bared arms, shading her eyes with her hand, and watches 



104 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

them until they are gone out of sight under the hill Sally is 
the envy of all the other village girls, and mothers gossip to- 
gether of this weighty journey of hers. 

Many an aged country-reared person knows what that journey 
was to Sally ; how grand and mysterious the town seemed to 
her, with its many streets, its crowds of people, its various wares, 
and its many lights; how, impressed and oppressed by it, she 
grew self-conscious and lonely, and wished herself home again. 
Her uncle's house was an enchanted palace to her, and she a 
dazed girl in it. It was revealed to her that what pertained 
to herself and to her father was not in keeping with her sur- 
roundings. They were plainly-dressed, homespun country-people, 
well clad alongside the deep greens and russet browns of their 
farm, but ill assorting with gay town fashions. She saw and 
took in much. Her keen senses and bright mind were quickened 
to a wider scope by this somewhat unpalatable taste of strange 
living. The day of her departure was a relief to her. She 
went back as she came, except that she was lightly laden with 
simple purchases. She was as warmly Avelcomed as if she had 
come from a foreign land. The trinkets she had bought were 
as marvellous to her mother and the other children as they 
would have been to her once. She somewhat pitied their igno- 
rance, but kept her own counsel. She was wiser than before 
she went, but not cpiite so happy. A glory had gone out of 
her home which could never come back. Its rooms were lower 
and narrower ; and their fitness had been lost from the garments 
which had been fashioned lor her with so much care. Their 



THE VISIT. 105 

textures and dyes were homespun, and so less esteemed. She 
made a better teacher for having been to Boston, because she 
had more weight with her scholars. But the sweetest relish 
of her rural home had died out for her. In later years it came 
again, as a delightful memory. She would then have given half 
she possessed to have been starting once more Irom the old farm- 
house, a simple-hearted girl in calico by the side of the home- 
spun father, with the dear mother watching her from the 
doorway. 

Our old horse plodded along so wearily that the shadows had 
grown long on the neighboring hills, and cow-bells were tinkling 
at the pasture-bars, when we drove through the gateway at the 
end of the green lane. Far away we had caught sight of our 
grandfather standing in his door. We knew him by his grav 
hair tossed in the wind. " He's an old dear," whispered Benny; 
"just a little cross sometimes, but never cross to me." No, he 
was never cross to little Benny, and seldom to any other child. 
He was a most orderly man, and was apt to lose patience when 
children upset his settled ways. He never was known to scold 
Benny, lor the boy was his namesake, and had about him, he 
used to say, the look of those who die young. There was an 
unusual trembling of the aged hand which patted our heads, 
and a very tender greeting of the old man to us. Then he 
held us at arms' length, saying, with a merry twinkle in his 
eye, " So you young rascals have come to haying, have you ? 
Well, I must say, your mother needn't have rigged you out 
Hke two Arabs; still, I think you'll do." Happy little Benny 



106 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

thought he was praising our looks, and told me shortly that 
Arabs must be some grand people. 

My grandlather was a keen-witted, resolute, handsome man 
of good English stock. His life was as methodical as clock- 
work. His thrift wrested a competence from the soil ; but his 
best legacy to his descendants was a certain inborn freedom of 
soul. He loved every inch of his farm, not as a plougher and 
plodder, but as an observer and thinker. So positive and sell- 
asserting was this high type of his manhood that his only son, 
when exceptionally well educated and of exalted rank in his 
profession, never seemed more than his equal. Having lived 
past his fourscore years, he ended his prosperous and reputable 
life by a death of serene dignity. 

He was called stern by his fellow-townsmen ; but no man or 
woman ever questioned his integrity. His career, considering 
the possibilities of his nature, was a narrow one, but of the best, 
so far as it went. It had little gilt and polish, — not enough 
of recreation, — but such as it was, he took it up patiently and 
faithfully, and got out of it whatever of good it had in it. He 
did with all his might whatever he had to do, which was so 
much that it crowded his life to the verge of servitude. He 
was serious and earnest, if not stern, because the demands of 
his lot left little room for lighter moods, so that a higher sense 
of justice and humanity was born of this half- tragic element 
of his condition. 

The children of such f^ithers were well-trained children. The 
parent's will was law with them, and the law of the parent was 



THE VISIT. 107 

the word of God. These unpetted yet deeply-loved sons and 
daughters were truthful and honest. They were respecters of 
age, keepers of the Sabbath, and clean in all their ways, because 
their home tuition had been founded upon the highest principles 
of religion and morality. Tears and tender words did not come 
easily to such hard workers and simple livers. They had an 
element of heroic resistance to what they considered weakness, 
and a Spartan estimation of all tokens of it. Mothers could 
lay out their dead children for burial, and fathers could look 
upon them with tearless eyes. They would put them in graves 
close to their homes, and then go back to their old grooves, 
giving little outward sign. But the hurt was there, deep and 
for all time. These massive old heroes, these truthful, earnest 
wrestlers for duty, held their reticence as a comely instinct, — 
a sacred inner life. 

The Christian New Englander of forty years ago was most 
reverent. His children were God's trust to him ; as such he 
trained them, and as such he gave them up. If he unwisely 
crucified the tastes and desires of his sons and daughters, it was 
because of his own blind zeal and an overstraining of Bible 
precepts. If any of them, in morality, fell short of the home 
standard, he was more smitten by it than he would have been 
by their death. 

After a supper of bread and milk, Benny and I were sent 
to bed, with orders to be up bright and early for the haying. 
The sun was already making great red streaks across the 
checked hangings in the east chamber when Benny's tap at 



108 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

my door, and the patter of his Uttle feet across the sanded 
floor, startled me from an uneasy slumber. I had been dream- 
ing of the enclosure in the mowing-field. I thought we were 
gathering buttercups on Olly's grave, when a great pit suddenly 
yawned, and Benny fell into it. " Quick, we are almost ready," 
he shouted, and then ran away, ''to help fix off,'' he said. He 
had pumped a basin of fresh water, which, with a clean towel, 
awaited me on the wooden bench at the back-door. I scrubbed 
my face and hands with zest in that tin basin, and would be 
willing to-day to taste, in the same homely way, the pleasant 
abandon of that summer morning, if with it would come back 
the scents and voices, the glowing light, and the simple occu- 
pations of its' long-past, happy day. 

We ate no breakfast, Benny and I, we were too happy for 
that ; besides, a huge basket under Jonathan's arm was, Hannah 
whispered, "brimful of goodies." The leathern-handled keg 
puzzled us ; but Benny was a philosopher, and, pointing to the 
flies swarming about its spigot, confidently declared that it held 
some savory drink. 

The smallest rakes were laid aside for the new hands, as our 
grandfather jocosely called us, and we were left to follow after 
the loads. Our little fists grew red and speckled ; but Benny 
said they would soon be tough like Jonathan's, and the fun of 
treading down the sweet hay and jolting over the sill of the 
barn more than made up for all our ills. " Our new hands 
ain't so green after all," remarked spruce David to his fellow- 
mower. " Tell better arter the new's off," was Jonathan's bluft' 



THE VISIT. 



109 



reply. " The old clown !" whispered Benny. " How clcvor 
David is !" said I. 

By and by, when the sun had gotten into the zenith, we began 
to feel hot and tired, and cast longing glances towards the shadv 




rock l;)y the spring, behind which were the keg and bundle. 
My grandfather, seeing us lag, took pity upon us, and sent us 
there to rest. "VVe ate our share of the lunch, and took long 
draughts of sweetened water from the keg. Bennv thought 
there was too much ginger in it, but drank freely. Alas ! for 
the struggling fly which, sticking fast upon Benny's nose, daubed 
over with molasses, made us forget* to put back the spigot. 

15 



no X-EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

When the thirsty mowers came round the rock the keg was 
empty. 

" ►So much for Ijabies in haying-time," growled Jonathan. My 
grandfather looked severe, and told us to " start for the house." 
So we did, David slipping round the rock to say to us that it 
was no matter, for he would fill the keg again. 

We idled the afternoon sadly away in the old farm-house. 
True to human nature, we little ones turned against each other. 
" You are black as a crow," said Benny. " And you," retorted 
I, "are as speckled as an adder." "All from this hateful hay- 
ing," Benny went on. Then, common grief making common 
cause, we came together again ; and, pledging everlasting absence 
from the having field, we dwelt in love and harmony until bed- 
time. tSomehow my tired little Ijody would not rest that night. 
I had another frightful dream about a deep pit and little Benny. 
I kept waking up ; but the bed-curtains looked so black, and 
the dimly-seen windows so ghostly, that I shut my eyes and 
lay trembling with fear half the night. It was very late the 
next morning when I was awakened by the merry haymakers 
under my window, on their way to the mowing-field. Above 
every other voic-e rang out Benny's, glad and care free. 

After that the haying-time passed away quickly and merrily. 
Best of holidays to me ; from which have come some of the 
brightest pictures and purest sentiments of my life. Pay-day 
came. Jonathan and David received their well-earned wages; 
scores of transient helpers had come and gone ; Benny and I 
each clasped in our brown hands four bright silver dollars. 



THE VISIT. 



Ill 



The big gate opened to let out the market-wagon, with two 
joyous-hearted (jhildren. Their clothes were much the worse 
for wear, and they looked even queerer than they did when they 
came. Thev turned tenderly Ijack to the white-haired old man, 
who watched them from the porch-door. " I'll come again very 
soon," called Benny- He did come, and the big gate opened 
wide to let him in. 









_iiji_S,>__V_ 



HE summer harvest was past, but 
not the remembrance of it. Benny and I 
were ever counting the months, and then the 
weeks, before another haying. We spent our 
holidays in the making of miniature rakes, and 
were garrulous the whole winter with our simple 
memories. No story-book could give us pleas- 
ure like going over the past summer's homely life. We talked 
much of little things : of the maimed lamb that limped at our 
call to his evening meal ; the .speckled trout in the deep old 
well ; the play rock ; the herds ; the apple-trees ; and much, very 
much, of the dear, trembling old man, who never seemed old 
to us, over whom the unreasoning love of childhood cast the 
glamour of immortal youth. 

There was to be a jubilee, in. anticipation of which I had 

exchanged my grandfather's dollars for bright ribbons, whilst 

Benny's had gone into the price of a pair of fine gaiters. The 

long-wished-for morning came. Benny's little jacket, with a 

112 



LITTLE BENNY. 113 

white collar piimed to its neck, hung from a nail in the wall ; 
his new gaiters stood upon the mantel. Benny could not wear 
them then. I entered into the sports of that day with all the 
buoyancy of childhood; and though I heard Benny's moans as 
I passed the half-opened door, I did not think at evening to 
bid him good-night or give him his wonted kiss. Giddy girl ! 
That same sick Benny was the gay companion of haying-time. 

Ever thus selfish is joy. What sympathy can gladness have 
with sorrow ? If death has never entered your own household, 
you can carry little consolation to the mourner, — your words 
will be as sounding ]:)rass and tinkling cymbals. Days passed 
away; long, weary days. The gaiters still kept their place 
on the mantel ; the white collar had become yellow with smoke 
and dust, but still it stayed. Benny no longer asked about the 
jubilee, and I shrank from his darkened room. How anxiously 
I watched the doctor's face as he softly emerged from the sick- 
chamber ! How my little heart beat if ever its wonted benignant 
smile returned ! 

One morning (Benny had been ill two weeks) I was awakened 
by the rumbling of a vehicle. There was no mistaking the 
sound ; it was the old market- was-on. In a few minutes I was 
by my grandfather's side. Thfere was no tremulous grasp of 
the hand, no gentle greeting, no fond pat on tha head. His 
thoughts were with Benny, his namesake. 

" Tread softly," whispered the doctor, as I led my grandfather 
to the side of the sick-bed. He leaned heavily on his staff, 
and a tear trickled down his furrowed cheek. 



114 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



" Benny will not help us hay another year," said the old man 
to me, in broken tones. How that death-knell fell on my soul ! 




Was Benny, the good, the beautiful Benny, to die and be buried 
in the cold, damp earth ! It could not be ; and yet, as I looked 
at him the terrible conviction forced itself upon me. His little 



LITTLE BENNY. 115 

brown hands had become thin and white, his cheeks sunken. 
He opened his eyes. 

" Benny, do you know me ?" asked grandfather, fondly. 

He murmured incoherently something al)Out haying-time, the 
big rock, and the mowing-field. Again my grandfather dropped 
a tear. It was more than my childish heart could bear. I ran 
to my chamber, and throwing myself upon the bed yielded to 
the first sharp agony of life. Oh, it is a fearful thing to pass 
for the first time through the gates of sorrow ! 

It was dark, very dark, when I was awakened by a light tap 
upon my shoulder. I knew the touch ; it was my grandfather's 
hand. I asked no questions, but followed him instinctively to 
the sick-room. I knew that Benny, my loved Benny, was dying. 

There was no shrinking from the mysterious threshold. In 
the agony of that moment I could not cry, but stood by the side 
of the dear boy as cold, calm, and still almost as himself. There 
was no look of recognition, no word from the palsied tongue. 
One gasp, one quiver of the thin lij), and the fragile chord which 
bound his pure soul to earth was broken, — there was no longer 
in that household a little Benny. It was a most solemn death- 
room. A mother wept for her lost one, and refused to be com- 
forted ; a father was bowed in agony for the child of his heart ; 
and, more touching still, the silvered locks of decrepit age 
mingled with the golden curls of lifeless childhood. 

Thus it is— the child sports a Ijrief hour ; manhood leagues 
with mammon a few short years ; and only here and there is 
given a long life. 



116 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Eummaging not long since amongst some old letters, I came 
upon one directed in faded ink to my grandfather. It could 
hardly be deciphered, so worn and discolored was it by time. 
It was a summons to Bomy's bedside. At the bottom of the 
page, in an old man's tremulous hand, was this postscript: "Benny 
died of brain fever the next day, at ten of the clock p.m. He 
was my best beloved grandchild." 

For weeks I mourned for my lost playmate. His chair kept 
its place in the corner ; the miniature rakes were fondly cher- 
ished ; the collar was still unpinned. By chance one day the 
chair was moved ; anon the rusty pin was drawn from the 
jacket, and one by one the little rakes disappeared. The next 
haying-time found me almost as blithe and gay as ever. Thus 
evanescent are the griefs of early childhood. 

Little Benny was buried on the old farm. It was my 
grandfather's wish that he should be. People came from 
far and near to his funeral. They made a quaint throng, 
— hard-faced men and women, serious and sympathetic, and 
young men and maidens, with a curious awe at this, in the 
country, unusual presentment of the sublime beauty of a dead 
child. All along the farm-yard fence, as far as to the farther 
gate, stood the homely teams of these people, who had left 
their tasks to show their respect and sympathy for their 
neighbor. This congregating of wagons about a country house 
was a sure token of woe, more significant and touching than 
any bands of crape ; so also was the decorous going in and 
out of the silent throng. Seen from a distance, they made a 



LITTLE BENNY. 



ii; 








blossoms 



solemn pageant contrasted 
with the usual quiet of a 
country home. 

Benny lay in his coffin between the 
windows of the " fore-room," — that _--■ 
room which was never used save for 'some 
memorial purpose. Its doors and wnidows ^'I!^^^^^ 
were flung wide open now, and the bright 
sunshine streamed athwart the child's face and 
kindled it into a marvellous life likene'>s. 
He had few flowers al^out him , but from the 1 
garden and the fields outside came the scent ol 
he had loved, and sweet-smelling 
things were clasped in the hands 
of the women. He seemed not 
to be dead, but asleep ; and most 
tenderly did nature caress this 
clay image of her 
child-lover with her 
best summer gifts. The 
mourners, with their dearest 
friends, sat about the boy, 
thus holding fast to him 
to the last. The preacher 
stood upon the threshold of 
the lore room, talking mostly to them, and praying 
for them with a painful personality. He did not, however, forget 

16 




118 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the application of liis text and the lesson of the day to the people 
in the other rooms. His voice pervaded every corner of the house, 
and the breeze -caught it up and carried it to the traveller on 
the highway, — a solemn sound. When he had finished Farmer 
Brown, in his homely way, but with a voice tender with sorrow, 
said, " The mourners can now look at the child." 

Did you ever respond to such a call ? What measure is there 
to the agony of this last silent interview with the unresponsive 
dead ; this unanswered greeting of one who, for time, is lost in 
the most irrevocable sense ; this unheeded letting-out of the 
affections to what is already going back to dust ? 

Next to the mourners, the neighbors were invited to take a 
last look at the departed. Keenly, as if it were but yesterday, 
do I remember the sweet speech of this unpolished man ; the 
instinctive shrinking of this tender-hearted rustic from thrusting 
a cruel fact upon tliose whom it most concerned. The relatives 
were asked to look upon their child as upon one who slept; 
the neighbors, for the last time, upon the dead. They all — men, 
women, and children — took their turn over the little coffin. They 
were greatly moved, even the hardest featured of them. Men 
drew their horny hands over their eyes, and women sobbed aloud 
over this child, whom many of them had never seen while living, 
but who, dead, wrought from their suppressed natures this miracle 
of emotion. 

He lay there, his golden curls and long lashes sun-gilded, and 
clinging to his marble image with strange brightness. He was 
to them a new and beautiful revelation. He was as unlike their 



LITTLE BENNY. 119 

own children as if he had belonged to another race. Death could 
not chisel the best of their own into his likeness. They saw, 
but could not comprehend, the rare quality of this child, and so 
they looked upon him and wept in wonder. He was too beautiful, 
they said, to be put out of sight ; and nature seemed to rebuke 
them while she smiled upon all the stages of this his last and 
little journey. The sun sank towards the west, and from Ijevond 
the woodland and pasture it streamed across the o|)en grave, 
and filled the thing itself with a waiting glory. The child was 
covered and carried across the green field, and let dowu into it ; 
and in a little while all there was left of the sad pageant of that 
summer's day was a small brown mound in sight of the west 
room window. 

It seems to me, as I look back, a sweet burial without dreail, 
that carrying out of the lovely child from tli<3 old farm-house, 
amidst sunshine and tender mourning, and laying him down in 
the green field which lie had made jocimd the summer before 
with his delight. We talked of this l:)oy as having been cut 
off", but after all his little life had Ijeen full and complete and 
well rounded ; and when his short journey had come to an end, 
the sunshine which he had brought with him flooded and followed 
him. His burial on it glorified the farm. He was always there, 
not as under the mound with its lettered stone, but as a true little 
Benny, who, unresponsive to touch or speech, did yet roam about 
the place. He has never grown old, but has grown grand with 
years. The capacity of this child has been perfected by loving- 
memory to the measure of the whole universe. He roams at 



120 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



large. I shall never know him here again, by sight or s})eech or 
touch, but one day we shall, I ti'ust, know each other, not as we 
were, but as we are to be. 

Thus the watchers and waiters, whose going away from us 
tore our hearts, are to take the sting of death from us. They 
compelled us -to shut them out of our earthly homes that they 
might welcome us into a heavenly. Dear children, you of earlier 
and you of later days, how will the mystery of your brief lives 
be unravelled when you shall come down resplendent to the shore 
of the shining river, that you may help over the old, the infirin, 
and the weary, who stayed behind and mourned for you ! 



1/ cJ.t'iC jpQ 







f^^fS^:^:^ 




«'^wc / 




jrandfather's burial-place was 
within a stone's throw of the 
west room windows. To one 
coming from north or south, 
east or west, it was as conspicuous 
as the house itselh Its tablets were the ghosts of my childhood. 
They gave me many terrified waking hours, taking shape and 
motion to me as I stared at them from my chamber window. 
These family graveyards were a- peculiar feature of the country. 
They gave pathos to a landscape, recording with tragic fidelity 
the sorrows and mortality of its inhabitants. My grandfather 
loved his burial-place. It was in the way of a straight path 
to the orchard and the mowing field, but he seemed glad to be 
turned aside by it. No spot, he said, was too good for little 
Benny. He used to sit hour after hour at the window which 
overlooked it, the wind softly lifting his silvery hair, while he 
silently contemplated this smallest, but most precious, of all his 

121 



122 



KUW ENGLAND BYGONE^S. 



fields. What was he thinking about ? what memories touched 
him? Avhat certainties awed him? Watching with the keen 
eye of childhood I got no sign, for the s})iritual life of this 
reticent old man was chary of utterance. lie knew that in this 
Ijed he should some day be laid at rest ; and the more trembling 

his old limbs grew, the 
nearer his feet approacherl 
the borders of the silent 
land, the more he used to 
sit and gaze 
at his uTaves. 




^'Nv"/'^>-P'Nk- 



and ponder, without doubt, V^ 

upon the mysteries of the hereafter. 

These little fields were family heirlooms. 
No one could be so pinched by poverty, 

or so depraved in sentiment, as w^illingly to sell them. AVhen 
farms changed owners, these were carefully exempted and fenced 
in. Occasionally circumstance so far removed, or Providence 
so blotted out, a posterity, that a gi-ave l)ecame ownerless. 



THE BUBIAL-PLACE. 123 

Even then humanity kept it from hard usage. No question 
of utility could uj^root from the sod the claim upon it of its 
first occupants. It was kept by their memory as firmly as 
when they held in living hands its written title-deeds. There 
comes especially to mind such a burial-place. It was upon a 
hillock in the corner of a field, at the end of a green lane : a 
lovely spot overlooking a wide stretch of country. A sweet 
apple-tree, always in summer full of fruit, overhung it. I see 
the uneven mound now, matted with OTass, strewn with golden 
apples, and only telling by tradition of the presence of the dead. 
I rememljer how stealthily children climbed up the wall and 
snatched at overhanging boughs. They were shy of the wind- 
falls on the other side, for these lonely graves were to fields 
what ghosts are to haunted chambers. 

My grandfather's old farm-house, with its lands, may go to 
strangers ; but the little field, first made precious to me by 
Benny's burial, shall remain undesecrated. Under every change 
of life I know that it will be to me and my children a hallowed 
possession. Its mounds, whose tenants have gone back to the 
dust from whence they came, have given place to hollows full 
of rank grass and yarrow. Its slabs of perishable slate are 
seamed and fretted by the wear and tear of many years. Its 
tumbled wall is covered with raspberry-vines and sumachs, and 
a maple-tree has grown monumental with the years which have 
eaten away the inscriptions Irom the stones beneath it. Not 
long since I visited the spot. I plucked a blossom from a straw- 
berry-vine which had thrown its tendrils into an old grave, and 



124 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

looked upon the uneven earth about me. Benny's Httle stone 
reproached me with its forty odd years of wear. I grew sorrow- 
ful. Then Irom the luxuriant outgrowth around me came the 
assurance of hope in death ; every crevice of the crumbling- 
stones was teemina; with veei;etation. Growth had been born 
of decay; from death had sprung beautiful life. The sod itself 
had been ripened by giving back to it its rightful dust. Why 
then should one mourn when a spirit, let loose from its bonds, 
exchanges its kinship with sin and sorrow and pain for a glorious 
immortality ? 

"Sacred to the memory of the dead!" This is the most 
common leo;end, and also the truest and l^est. There is no beino; 
so mean that he may not claim for himself this epitaph. The 
grave is common ground. So far as this world goes, it brings 
all to the same level. The beggar is as sure of his morsel of 
earth as the prince is of his toml). The rankness of the one 
is as eloquent as the pomp of the other. The prince was clothed 
in purple and fine linen, and the damp mould clasped him ; the 
beggar was clad in rags, and the busy grass wove lor him a 
rentless covering. 

The world is full of unknown graves, of whose tenants she 
tells no stories : the unmarked and uncared-for graves of people 
stranded by accident or circumstance ; of slaughtered soldiers ; 
of pioneers in new countries '; of martyrs to liberty ; of travellers 
in far lands. The sea is continually dragging into its hungry 
maw human life, which it absorbs and hides as relentlessly as it 
washes away the sands of its shore. There is an unutterable 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 125 

pathos in nameless graves. I have walked through acres strewn 
thick with soldiers' bones, the harvest of great battles. No in- 
scription has touched me like the simple " unknown" which 
breaks the monotony of their epitaphs. It tells that there lies 
a man, no matter how long and well he has fought for his 
country, who was so undowered by fortune, so smitten hy cir- 
cumstance, that even his name has been lost ! Yet no grave 
can be naked and forsaken, for trees and shrubs and grasses 
and flowers will grow on it, and over it spans the grand arch 
of heaven. 

In the pioneer days of New England the churchyard was a 
favorite burial-place. The early settlers, beset hy Indians, gen- 
erally planted their meeting-houses upon hill-tops which over- 
looked the wooded country. They were thus less easily surprised, 
and better- defended in case of danger. These meeting-houses 
had watch-towers ; were strong with oaken beams and barricades ; 
and on Sunday were filled with armed worshippers. To hold 
out unsleeping through long services was the chief effort of 
many of the overworked hearers. But the men, whose eyes 
were wide open, whose ears were quick to hear, whose thoughts 
were clear, condensed, their post was in the towers. Not an 
unseen shadow passed over the woodland ; not an unheard twig 
broke in it ; scarcely the rustle of a leaf escaped them. Death, 
or worse, might be the price of one minute of laggard service. 
"What a grand picture one of these heroic old watchmen would 
make, perched, defiant and faithful, on one of those bygone 
church-towers ; standing there as much a warrior against the 

17 



126 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

wildness of nature as the savageness of man. Gerome has painted 
a Mussubnan calUng to prayers from tlie minaret of a mosque. 
The turbaned old Turk, leaning from his lofty perch, gives a 
weird beautv to this cold, heathen picture. Our Christian watch- 
man, lifted over the desolateness of the forest and the wiles of 
the savage, could not help standing out from such a foreground 
with a clear-cut and sublime distinctness. 

It is curious to trace out on the higliest point of some prom- 
inent New England landscape the almost hidden outlines of one 
of these Christian strongholds, invisible to the passer-by, but 
positive and well-defined to the antiquary. I have seen the 
latter coax out fr'om a grass-grown summit the underlying sods 
of an old structure. He paced it for me, and told me where were 
its pulpit, its door, and its towers. He rebuilt for me this quaint 
house into the tamed landscape. One cannot at this day well 
appreciate the heroism of that armed devotion. It is easier to 
imagine how dazed one of the old watchmen would be to find 
himself suddenly resuri'ected upon his tower, with no foe to fight 
against. 

When the Indians had passed away the meeting-houses were 
still, for convenience, centrally located ; and, being used by a 
whole township, were often far away from any habitation. Later, 
however, the isolated meeting-house, with its " God's acre," was 
deserted. Population increased, villages sprang up, and new 
places of worship were built to meet the growing means and 
needs of the people. The old burial-grounds began to seem 
too far away and too lonely for the beloved dead. Village people 



THE BUBJAL-PLACE. 



127 




di'jse to lay them in some 
** '-pot near by, which was 

lenced carefully out and adorned 
with trees and shrubs. At the same 
time the thrifty farmer set aside a spot 
m some iield, apt -to be the most conspicuous 
pomt on his larm. 
Meanwhile the deserted plat, sown thick with the 
bones of Christian pioneers, was taken up and cared for by nature. 
Tradition clung to it, ghosts haunted it, vegetation ran riot over 
it, its walls tumbled, its stones were zigzag, it was ragged and 
uneven and wild, but beautiful. It lay upon the landscape a 
legend of the past, whether you read it in its rude inscriptions 



128 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

or in the gray desolateness of its aspect. It came to be known 
as "the old graveyard," — sometliing incorporated into tlie history 
and atmosphere of tlie place ; a solemn suburb, in the sentiment 
of which every villager had an inherited or acquired possession. 
A mile away from a New England village, on the edg6 of a 
primeval forest, by the side of a deserted highway, have lain 
undisturbed for years the bones of its patriarchs. Here was 
once a meeting-house, but so long ago that nothing but tradition 
tells of its site. This meeting-house doubtless had its towers 
and its watchers ; but the thing itself, and the actors in it, have 
literally gone back to dust. Only the undying beauty of the 
landsca])e remains, which embodies in it the ancient burial-place. 
This is almost surrounded by a pine ibrest, and is only separated 
by the thread of a grass-grown path from a beautiful lake. It 
is one of the sweetest spots I ever knew ; and if a patch of earth 
can be sacred to the memory of the dead', this is made so by 
the dedication of munificent nature. The site of it, with that 
of the meetiny-house, contrary to custom in troublous times, 
lies low. The shimmering little pond must have been delightful 
to the pioneers of the unljroken wilderness. Its shores can be 
but little changed from what tliey were in the days of the old 
meeting-house, for the pine-trees of its encircling forest seem 
as ancient as time itself. Were the pines, without undergrowth, 
and the pond and the highways good for strategic purposes, or 
were the builders of this ancient house beguiled by the exceeding 
beauty of the landscape ? Three Indians, after a hard struggle, 
were once killed upon this pond, and the meeting-house outlived 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 129 

their race; so I suppose the old savage drama was played out 
in it. Long sermons were preached; guns were stacked by its 
doorway ; and up in its towers stood men, whose eyes never 
turned away from the road, the pond, and the pines. Of all 
the tragic and historic life of the spot, we have left only this 
forsaken burial-place. 

Now and then a traveller, drawn by the shimmering of the 
little pond through the trees, follows the by-road which leads 
to it. He stoops down, pulls apart tangled weeds and grass, and 
tries to spell out some of its time-worn inscriptions. He finds 
the deeply-cut name of the last pastor of the church, and of 
scores of other ancient and godly men. What he fails to decipher 
are manifold texts of scripture and verses of old hymns, quaintly 
spelled and lettered. This now illegible stonescript was once 
tenderly illustrative of the virtues of the underlying dead. I 
recall, as if it were but yesterday, the last burial in that old 
churchyard ; the rude bier ; the procession of villagers following 
after' the mourners ; the sunshine and the silence of the day. 
The train wound slowly through the forest, by the pond, into 
the churchyard. There was no rattling of hearse and coaches ; 
no crowd of gazers in holiday attire. It was a carrying of the 
dead with simple, solemn ceremony to the grave. The bier was 
set down ; the villagers stood around it ; and then the minister, 
with bare head, said, reverently, " Let us pray." His voice went 
through the old wood, across the pond, and seemed to fill all 
space. 

I know of no service more beautiful and impressive than a 



13U JV:EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

village funeral of olden times. I have been to many such, and 
each stands out in memory like a painting. The bereavement 
of one villager was the grief of every other. Silence and sorrow 
fell over them all. The presence of the dead hallowed a house. 
Hard-working women crowded in, and grew gentle and beautiful 
with svmpathv. Bronzed men, with hands calloused by toil, 
lifted and folded the rusty pall as lightly as if it had l)een of 
gossamer. The preacher, standing upon the threshold of the 
" best room," filled the house with his simple words ; hymns were 
sung reverently by untrained voices ; relatives took a last look 
of their dead ; neighbors followed after them ; the lid was ham- 
mered down with that mournful stroke once heard never for- 
gotten ; the coarse-handed, warm-hearted men lilted the coffin 
as tenderly as they had handled the pall, and carried it outside 
where the bier waited to receive it. The house was hushed as 
it passed out, and the procession, called out by some neighbor, 
noiselessly formed behind it. 

What a terrible passing out that is, — the going forth of a 
dead body never to i'eturn ! Hope goes forth with the most 
forlorn departure of a living friend. Sickness, distance, time, 
all leave room for desire and expectation ; death never. AVe 
cannot know our loss until our dead have left us. The presence 
of the lifeless body gives us a measure of consolation. It awes 
us by the symmetry of its marble beauty. The utter peace 
and silence which possess it steal also into us, and we sit com- 
forted in the presence of our dead. But oh ! who can measure 
the utter agony of that hour when they go from us for all time. 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 131 

borne out unresisting, to be forevermore things of the past ? 
If we call out to them, their own lips are dumb. Stretching out 
our arms for them, their own are bound and move not. Turning- 
back to the desolated household, what utter emptiness is there, 
silence and darkness and nothingness where was fulness and 
brightness and presence ! No echo of a voice in the air ; no 
footfall ; never so light a touch of the hand ; gone, utterly gone ; 
henceforth to be slipping farther and farther away from the 
treacherous hold of memory. 

After a funeral the people were apt to linger, dropping olF 
one by one, each to his own w^ay and work ; only relatives and 
near friends staying to sit down to unrelished baked meats. 
The bier, flinging out its fantastic arms, always marked the 
newest-made grave, and stayed upon it until transferred to that 
of a later comer. 

I have listened hours to a village necrology from the lips of 
an old woman, who never missed the date of a funeral, nor forgot 
the way the wind blew on the day of it, or the meats the mourners 
ate. Her tales, told mostly in rude rhyme, were ludicrously 
minute, yet simple and touching. It was like the unrolling of 
a panorama of scenes, rough, perhaps, and sharply sketched by 
a few lines, but most admirable for truth and power. Tender 
traditions, quaint old customs, you are all a part of the treasures 
of bygone days. 




■^".V.'.-rfk-./.i^S^,#^. 







Theee "were "lined men" 
an<l ' lined A\omeii," Lut no 
sei\ant^, iii my grandtather's 
day. These "hired" men and 
women were the sons and 
daughters of respectable farmers, who had simply transferred 
themselves into more prosperous homes than their own. There 
was no degradation in the change. Hard labor was the birth- 
right of the average farmer's boy, and he cared little whether 
he drudged upon his father's farm or upon that of a neigh- 
bor. The girl who was neat and thrifty at home made a neat 
and thrifty "help," and as such she had her reward in a 
good name and kindly treatment. Her pay was very small as 
wages are now reckoned, but ample for the needs of her 
time. Her dress was suited to her calling. In winter it was 
of homespun woollen ; in summer it was of strong gingham, also 

18 



134 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

home-made, but far prettier than the winter garment. The 
threads of the latter, spun in long winter evenings and dyed 
in the chimney-corner, made sombre, unbecoming stuffs. The 
ginghams, lancifully checked with blue or yellow, were the prod- 
uct of the flax-field. The rustic weaver, sitting in the sunshine 
on summer days, skilfully plied her shuttle, and from the seeming 
entanglement of white threads with blue and yellow and brown, 
rolled off from the beam of her loom an admirable web. It was 
clean-looking and strong, and into the making of it had gone 
some of the farm's most precious products. Underlying its 
texture were the dainty blue blossoms of the flax-bed, and skill 
and judgment had been brought to bear upon each of the many 
processes of its handling. 

The garments made from it would now seem as quaint as the 
web itself. Hannah always wore when working about the house 
a long, broad apron, with gathered bib, tied at the neck and waist 
with strings. In winter this was of blue mixed cotton and wool 
cloth, and in summer of the checked blue or yellow and white 
gingham. It was an inseparable part oi her working attire, a 
true servant's costume, as peculiar and becoming to her vocation 
as the peasant dress of any other country. 

This Hannah, the " hired girl" of my grandfather, was a repre- 
sentative one. Her behavior was as befitting her station as 
her dress. Despite the seeming equality of her position in the 
household, she was utterly honest, patient, faithful, and respectful. 
She never changed her place, and she spun and wove an<l knit 
and stitched her strength into the fabrics of the house until her 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN 135 

hair grew gray and her eyes dim in its service. Long rule made 
my grandmother somewhat hard, and she was liable to exact 
from Hannah, as a right, that labor which she had first bought 
as a privilege. The lifelong serving-woman, by running in her 
narrow groove year after year, had become a sort of machine, 
and her mistress had learned to expect the unfailing working of 
it. The relation was not a tender one, but it was honest and 
respectable. In the soil of that New England life the pan lay 
close to the surface. 

Such servants as Hannah were often sought in marriage by 
hard-working young farmers. They made faithful, thrifty wives, 
and their houses were scrupulously neat. They only shifted one 
drudgery for another, but in their own humble homes pride 
was added to the patience which they wove into the webs of 
their employers. 

The neighbors talked of Hannah as having been a good-looking 
lass, but when Benny and I first knew her she was much the 
worse for wear. Still her faded gray eyes looked kindly upon 
us and we loved her. Nobody seemed to think that Hannah 
had grown old. Her name and her virtues were a perennial 
possession of the house and the neighborhood. She was always 
called ''Hannah." Her dress and her ways never changed. 
What went to make up " Hannah" was the same through all 
years. By this the people knew her. The more unkindly time 
treated her body the more valued " Hannah" became. The 
serving-woman grew lean and wrinkled and ugly, but " Hannah" 
grew venerable and Ijeloved. There was about her a certain 



136 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

magnetism which ignored station. This humble serving-woman, 
this " Hannah" in her homespun tyre, filled with wild herbs and 
roots, carried healing with her to sick neighbors. She was so 
a:entle that she was more welcome than her mistress. In that 
household into which death had come Hannah w\as sure to be. 
The softness of her voice and touch and step brought consolation 
with them. There was something in her life that preached, — 
that great taith which she had borne with her from childhood, 
and which she plainly shaped into simple words, — that utter 
self-sacrifice which clothed her like a garment, and put out of 
sight all that was homely about her. The sympathy she ofiered 
fell like balm where wiser speech failed. 

Hannah had queer ways. She was given to interior adorn- 
ments, and the fruits of her needlework were thick in the house. 
These were not fine, but considering the material from which she 
wrought them, and the time and patience which she gave to them, 
they were worthy of praise. She pinned black broadcloth cats 
to the wall, Ijrought out in silhouette upon red flannel. As por- 
traits they were failures, and little Benny was always saying to 
her that he was sure he had never seen any cats like them. She 
hung novel comb-cases under all the bedroom looking-glasses. 
These were of varied shapes and materials, some of broadcloth, 
some of straw, and less pretentious ones of covered pasteboard, 
all much stitched with colored silks. The patchwork about the 
house was endless. Hannah hoarded scraps of silk and cambric, 
and pieced them together into pin-balls, chair-cushions, and cov- 
erlets. She glued painted pictures to the inside of wide-mouthed 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 



137 



glass jars, which she filled with flour and planted with asparagus, 

thus simulating quaint vases. She embossed blown egg-shells 

with the pith of bulrushes, coiled round ' 

bits of bright silk, and hung them upon 

pine boughs in the fireplaces of the front 

rooms. Homely handiwork, but well 

seasoned with the true flavor of rustic 

hfe. 

Her best taste she gave to her 
flowers. She had never read a 
book on flower-culture ; her lessons 
had come from 
woodland, pas- 
ture, and 
field. From her 
earliest childhood she had 
been used to blossoms, 
bright and sweet and growing 
just where they ought to grow. 
Her scarlet poppies set 
off the Southern-wood 
bed, hop- 
vines hid 
the 




138 NEy ENGLAND BYGONES. 

ras'^ed earden-wall, and lilies and rose - bushes ran riot in 
corners. She had her bachelor's buttons and marigolds and 
pinks, and a host of other common flowers, crowded against 
beets and carrots and parsnips, wherever she could get a chance 
for them. They ran parallel on both sides with the broad, 
middle garden- walk, flanked the edges of side-beds, and faced 
their outermost paths with a fringe of sweetness. Coming up 
two-leaved and tiny, they had a hard fight against my grand- 
father's and Jonathan's hoes; l)ut they throve nevertheless, and 
ripened into the bloom and fragrance of the garden. 

Lilac-bushes straggled about unpruned, and were troublesomely 
prolific. Forty years ago they stood compactly by the doorsteps 
and under the windows of most well-to-do-farmers' houses, from 
their toughness and brightness fit country shrubs. The grateful, 
abundant thing took kindly to any earth, to any location, climb- 
ing out of shade into sunshine, spreading rapidly in bright places, 
a good worker, and long suffering of ill usage. I remember one, 
shut into the angle of a tall fence, which, although most dense 
of foliage, was the grief of my early childhood, because of its 
barrenness ; but which, the very first spring it reached the top- 
most board, was purple with blossoms. 

Hannah's rose-bushes never had any pruning, save what nature 
gave them. Old stocks died down, and new ones came in their 
stead. They seemed always to be dying and coming to life again. 
They were unmercifully knocked about and trampled upon by 
spring workers ; hens burrowed through their roots ; and yet 
they always came out every spring as good as new, and bore 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 139 

the largest and sweetest of roses. I do not see such roses now, 
so full of scent, so deep-dyed, as the double damask and white 
ones which blossomed in my grandfather's garden. It seems 
as if they must have gotten their strength from the rugged soil. 
The damask ones were like peonies for size, and their Ixishes, 
thick with full-l:)lown flowers and buds, in every stage of opening, 
were only surpassed for beauty by those of the creamy-white 
rose, which were as soft-tinted as the first blush of dawn, and 
daintily-scented as the quickening breath of spring. 

Hannah's flowers were all sweet-smelling, gracious, hardv, 
grateful things. Her pinks were marvels for color and scent. 
Her bachelor's buttons, blue and purple and white, perfumed 
the morning. Her columbines, wild denizens of the garden, kept 
always a woodland flavor. They got mixed and unsettled as 
to color, but held fast their untamed nature. 

The pride of the garden were the two peony roots, just inside 
the gate on either side. They were amongst the earliest comers 
in spring, peeping up out of the brown mould with their great 
crimson Jeaf-buds, which speedily thrust up into strong stocks, 
to be the bearers of as many blossoms. How those peonies 
grew ! New stocks came up every year, and each new stock 
seemed to bring with it a peony heavier and deeper-dyed than 
before. Jonathan tied them up every season ; but still they 
waxed bigger and bigger, until a barrel hoop would not hold 
them. They were the envy of all the children, and the admi- 
ration of farmers' wives. 

Poor unlettered Hannah, so patient in her round of homely 



140 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

toil, so fond of flowers, had an untaught dehght in Ijeautiful 
things. Treading with weary feet her toilsome way, she trans- 
muted the joys and sorrows and stinted incidents of her homely 
life into pure gold ; and making the must of her meagre chances, 
has compelled me to remember her not so much by Avhat she 
was as by what she might have been. We can never rate a 
person justly until we have (lisentangled the story 'of his or her 
life from the impetus or liindrance given to it by i'ortune. What 
Hannah was I know ; what she might have been is suggested by 
her largeness of heart and sweetness of instinct. With proper 
scope here this serving-woman might have been a lady. Who 
shall say now that she was not a lady ; and that wdiat she was 
equal to, and got not in this life, she is in eternity finding in 
full measure ? 

But Jonathan. Ah, Jonathan ! what shall I say of thee ? 
The first sight I had of thee, thou wast sitting in the old market- 
wagon, smoking and cross-legged. When I last saw thee, thou 
wast sittin<'' in the miller's door, still smoking and cross-leo;o;ed. 
Unshaven, unshorn, with nose, chin, and cheeks all awry, his 
nether garments shrinking from his blue hosen, his bristly hair 
standing out from his weather-worn hat, Jona+han lounged on 
the low stoop, }.)ufting away at his pipe, joking with " Molly" 
and the miller, and interlarding his slow talk with many a "yaw" 
and " wall." 

Yet, with all his uncouthness of person, dress, and dialect, he 
was a true Jonathan, honest, self-reliant, hard-working, kind even 
to gentleness. He was tender of children, and merciful to all 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN 141 

dumb creatures. When a young lamb chanced to stray from 
the fold, it was Jonathan who stayed out two-thirds of the chilly 
autumn night until he had found it, and then nursed it until it 
was strong again. " Good Jonathan," said little Benny, in the 
wanderings of his sickness. " Good Jonathan," echoes my heart 
after many years. 



'-%-' 



"W^^ 







19 




V HEY lived at my grandfather's 
just as most of the well-to- 
do New England farmers 
lived forty years ago. On 
Monday morning, long be- 
iore sun-rise, my grandmother 
and Hannah would be busy be- 
fore two steaming tubs in the long porch. By this early start 
they got the freshness of the morning. The sun came up 
from behind the distant hills, lifted shadows from the wood- 
land, mist from the valley, and cast a shimmer upon the dew- 
covered fields. It streamed through the porch-door, across 
the floor, past the washers, and exalted what was a little 
while before only the dull aspect of labor to a share of the 
brightness of the morning. There is a transient time between 
the uprising of the sun fi'om the horizon and its full pos- 
session of the landscape, in which there is a sort of pictorial 
aspect of the meeting of day with night, which is exquisitely 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 



143 



beautiful. Only the country-liver can fully feel it — this dving 
of night with the birth of day — this supreme moment when the 
mists and dimness and low voices of the one exhale into the 
melody and brightness of the other. It is a daily miracle — this 
sudden transition from gray to rosy light — this unrolling of the 
dew-covered landscape — this assumption, in delicious crescendo, 
of sound — this quickening of the day's life over the sleep of 




night — this flying of darkness, as of a ghost pursued, before the 
flooding of light — this oldest of all stories again told. Awake, 
for the day has dawned ! 

In those days women washed who went to church in brocades 
and satins. They used no machinery, there was no bleaching- 
powder nor blueing in their tubs, and yet their linen came out, 



144 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

as Hannah used to say to my grandmother, " as white as the 
driven snow." These two women kept time at their scrubbing, 
and in the early morning, when they were fresh, hummed psahn 
tunes together. They were not beUttled Ijy this labor, but by 
their efficiency and content they gave dignity to it. It niay 
have broadened their hands, — I am sure it did their chests, — but 
they accepted, with the utmost willingness, these clumsy and 
necessary toils of their living. How I longed to plunge my 
arms into the foaming, sparkling, rainljow-tinted suds, in spite 
of Hannah's bleached, parboiled fingers ! When Jonathan had 
carried the tubs to the well for the final rinsing of the linen, 
it w^as my care afterwards to keep Betsy, the old horse, from 
walking under it, flapping snow-white upon the line. Those 
washing-days were some of the Ijest play-days and dream-days 
of my childhood. Who can number the bubbles of both suds 
and brain which have sparkled and floated away in the atmosphere 
of their cjuaint surroundings? 

The east-porch door was, my grandmother said, " a sightly 
place." Far away on the horizon, between two hills, nestled a 
small hamlet. The deep valley below was dense with an old 
forest, from which a belt of green fields arose and fell again 
to make a bed for the mill-stream, down to which stretched my 
grandfather's broad acres. The mill and the roof of the miller's 
red cottage were just in sight, and the clatter of wheels and 
the babbling of waters were pleasant to hear. Around the corner 
one caught a glimpse of the brook where Molly, the miller's 
daughter, bleached her linen, and Jonathan loitered with her 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 145 

when his day's work was done. Farther on was Benny's Httle 
grave. 

In that porch-door I used to sit and dream away the day, 
hstening to the harmless talk of the washers, who never let a 
traveller go unheeded on the highway. AVhat innocent gossip 
it was, as I hear it now, whispering through the years ! " Where 
is the parson going this early ?" " Who can be sick now ? the 
doctor is riding like the wind." " I shouldn't think Mrs. Brown 
could spare Sally for school to-day." Thus one by one the 
wayfarers went Ijy, and the washers watched and babbled 
until they grew tired with their work, and so unobservant and 
silent. 

Twice a week, with much method and little bustle, quantities 
of butter and cheese were made ready for the market. The 
unctuous odor of those tasks comes back to me, and I still taste 
the all-pervading flavor of the cheese-room. I see the clumsy 
press, trickling with sour juices, the polished wooden bowls, the 
rows of shining pans set out to scald in the sunshine, mistress 
and maid, in checked homespun aprons, shaping the golden 
butter or cutting the tender curd. Dear, simple-hearted women ! 
your work was the common task of a farmer's household, but you 
made it seem like a pastime by the skill you brought to bear 
upon it. It might have been drudgery in other hands, but in 
yours it only showed how little the dignity of labor depends upon 
what one does, and how much upon the way in which tasks are 
taken up. Untoward accidents sometimes happened. The cream 
would not give up its butter, or the cheese cracked in turning, 



146 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

mishaps dreaded by skilful dairy-women. Old Nance, who lived 
in the edge of the wood, beyond the miller's cottage, was sup- 
posed to bewitch farmers' cows to the spoiling of their products, 
without mercy, and many a farm-house door had nailed upon 
its lintel a horseshoe as a charm against her plottings. If there 
was any virtue in them the old woman lay down often at night 
with uneasy bones. Old Nance was a forlorn, crazed creature, 
whose early history had been dropped out of speech, and who 
throve best in her half-savage woodland life. The farmers added 
to the pittance which the selectmen grudgingly gave her, so that 
she never suffered for food or clothing. Eyery ambition had died 
out of her. She seemed to have but one vestige of humanity 
left, and that was her affection for the living things in the woods 
about her. Birds were always hovering over her hut, and in 
winter the snow around it was thick with footprints of untamed 
creatures which had come to pick up the crumbs she had pinched 
for them from her poverty. Nothing could be more repulsive 
than this haggard old woman, crouching over her embers in her 
one-roomed hut, or groping with a faded shawl over her head 
for fagots amongst the white snow of the forest. She was a 
blot upon the landscape, this waif of humanity stranded alongside 
the purity of domestic life. 

Uncouth old safe, dearer to my grandmother than costly bric-a- 
brac to modern fine lady, nobody seems to make nowadays such 
cheeses as bulged out your canvas sides, prettily mottled with 
tansy or wholesome yarrow, and crumbling under the knife when 
cut. They had a toothsome way of dissolving in the mouth, 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 147 

and tickling the palate with a pleasant tingle. The fine grain 
of the products of my grandmother's dairy might have been 
due to the fineness of her own texture. I have more often tasted 
far coarser results from like material. Hers looked and tasted 
like the work of a lady. 

The heavy laljor of the day over, and the hearth swept and 
scrubbed, my grandmother and Hannah, who were never idle, 
sat down to their mending, or the one went to her distafii' and 
the other to her weaving. My grandmother was never hand- 
somer than she was when sitting by her little flax-wheel, with 
a handkerchief of white muslin about her neck, her snow-white 
hair drawn under her plain cap, and the rosy sunlight of the 
waning day falling across her faded face and still fine figure. 
Upon her also fell, like a benediction, that soft-tinted later beauty 
which is the inheritance of vigorous, ripe old age. Hannah, 
glorified by the same sunlight, played her plainer part, and sat 
by her wheel or at her loom, her attire and mien adjusted to her 
station with a singular fitness. 

The clatter of the loom in the chamber and the whizzing of 
the flax-wheel below made a constant hum of industry in the 
old farm-house. Much wool was also spun, and the moaning 
of the big wheel was the saddest sound of my childhood. It 
was like a low wail from out the lengthened monotony of the 
spinner's life. I used to stop my ears against it, and many 
a time have run down to the woodland to get away from its 
painful persistence. The same wail, taking other shapes, has 
followed me ever since, and after all there is to every life, even 



148 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the seemingly most fortunate, a deep undertone of complaint 
and resistance. 

My grandmother's little flax-wheel was a gossipy thing, whirring 
away at racv bits of news falling from the lips of demure old 
ladies in broad frilled caps and square neckerchiefs. How like 
they had all grown by walking in the same rut all their days ! 
The only individual flavor about them seemed to lie in the 
diverse figures on their snuff-box covers, and the varied stitchings 
of their goose-quill knitting-sheaths. How they talked and knit, 
and knit and talked, with tireless tongues, putting in marks at 
their narrowings ; slowly shaping their socks with oft-repeated 
measurings ! Upon one of them, flighty Huldah, I look back 
with peculiar liking. She was a full-blooded little gossip, the 
kindest of mischief-makers. Everything about her, her dried- 
up, sinewy figure, snapping gray eyes and shrill voice, her yawn- 
ing calash, huge reticule, and broad pocket were in keeping with 
her calling. Everybody was glad to see Huldah's blue cotton 
umbrella bobbing up and down upon the highway ; and no crone 
was surer than she of light rolls and a strong cup of tea. She 
always carried an umbrella through rain or shine because, she 
once confidingly whispered to little Benny, she was "just the least 
bit flighty in the upper story." She was particular about the 
quality of her snuff, and most generous with it. The cow on 
the cover of her box was the delight of all youngsters. Flighty 
though she was, she had, Jonathan said, " an uncommon taking 
way with her." She praised the farmers' crops and the gude- 
wives' linen. She had a gift of making you pleased with yourself. 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 



149 



I can hear lier now, " They du say, Jonathan, that Molly is just 
the peertest and pootiest gal in town. Lors me ! Hannah, you 
can du more work than any other gal." She was most excellent 
in sickness, — endless in pa- 
tience, and a sleepless watcher. 
There was a charm in the 
very click of her needles, 
which seemed to keep time 
with the blinking of her eyes. 
I was sure, though, that many 
of her stitches were false ones, 
and Hannah held her stockings 
in high contempt. Her true 
hold upon the patience and 
affections of the people lay in 
that very flightiness of which 
she was so pathetically con- 
scious, — an infirmity which 
never fails to touch the 
sympathy of the rudest 
people. She pro- 
fessed to live with 
her brother, although 
her true abiding-place 
was with her towns- 
people at large. Her unbidden coming always brought them 

good. The charities of her simple heart w^ere as broad and 

20 




150 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

healing as if her brain had been stronger, and the draft she 
made upon their pity came back to them in kindly acts. No 
hearth was ever too crowded to take her into its circle ; no hand 
ever too busy to grasp hers in welcome. So this half-crazy 
woman, chattering and laughing with a wild wit, with no single 
external grace to commend her, through the mystic way of 
humanity passed like a beatitude across her neighbors' thresholds. 
Her foibles weighed with them as gossamer ; but the sweetness 
of her mission stayed after her. Poor Huldah ! The first time 
I left my grandfather's home alone her cotton umbrella stood by 
the door. She herself patted me on the head, called me a good 
child, and gave me a piece of dried gingerbread out of her 
snuff"y reticule. The gingerbread I threw into the highway, but 
the quaint picture of the kind-hearted, wandering old woman — 
manv years dead, and whom I never saw again — I cannot throw 
away. 

Saturday at my grandfather's brought Ijaking, with its morning 
bustle. Such a hurrying and scurrying and sputtering and 
splashing as there was ! For a short space misrule seemed to 
have invaded the household. The big oven crackled and roared, 
whilst Jonathan plied it with fuel. Hannah was reckless with 
milk and eggs. My grandmother kept up a continued rattling 
of spoons and pans, and I seemed always to be in the way. 
Gradually materials took shape. The fire died down in the 
oven ; Jonathan cleared and swept it, and shut it up. Shortly 
it was opened and tried, and then packed with pots and pans 
and plates, close up to the brim. Doughnuts sizzled and steamed 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 



151 



in the big pot on the crane, and the scent of food, cooked and 
uncooked, was far-reaching and positive, pleasant and appetizing. 
The household, by degrees, settled down. The doughnuts were 
skimmed out and the fat set by to cool. The hearth was swept ; 
the floors and tables scrubbed ; soiled garments were changed for 
fresh ; and, with the twilight, peace seemed to come in through 
doors and windows, — peace to rest upon the white heads of aged 
man and aged woman, upon their man-servant and maid-servant, 
and upon the child within their gates. 





/' HE essence of neighborliness is fine- 
grained. Its charity suflferetli long and 
is kind ; its humanity never wearieth ; 
it is unbound by custom ; unljought by 
price; a perennial spring; an invaluable 
gift. Behold in a woman your model 
country neighljor. She is lynx-eyed, but not over-curious ; spon- 
taneous, l>ut not familiar ; helpful, but not aggressive. She takes 
note of your necessities, which she relieves without ostentation. 
So great is her generosity of effort that she keeps no account 
in memory of those deeds by which she has made you her debtor. 
If she needs you she freely asks of you. She is more reticent 
of her words than her works ; and weighs well her speech, that 
by it her social relations may not be marred. She is unmoved 
by impulse or prejudice. She may be hard of exterior, but ten- 
derness dwells in her. If bidden to a feast she goes to it in 
her best attire, with serious dignity ; but into the sick-room she 



NEIGHBORS. 153 

glides with unchanged garments, bearing with her the healing 
of herbs, softness of presence, and a feeling heart. 

My first-born was buried from a country home. His short 
life had been of no use to any one outside of that home. To my 
neighbors he had left nothing worthy of remembrance ; he had 
made hardly a ripple upon the surface of their quiet lives. He 
had simply come and passed away. Lo! what was wrought by 
the silent mystery of his death. They thronged about him. 
They touched his white garments with exquisite tenderness, and 
let fall upon them tears of pity and love. One of them wrapped 
him in his winding-sheet, smoothed his hair prettily, and touched 
his Ijrow with a holy, motherly kiss. 

Beloved country neighbors of another home, dear are the 
memories of your spontaneous kindness to me and mine, — you 
true, tender-hearted, Iree-handed, helpful, bygone neighbors. 
Tirzah, Tirzah the good ! you were hard-worked and plain ; 
but you were so clothed upon with self-denial, kindness, and 
charity that my children loved you, and you were beautiful to 
them. They never missed in you any graces ; to them you were 
pure gold. Dear old woman ! when your weary feet shall pass 
over to the shining shore, two, I am sure, will gladly go down 
to meet you. Kind old Tirzah, may I some time see you in the 
beautiful garments of immortality! '' Grod bless Tirzah!" lisped 
Marion, in infantile speech ; and night after night went up this 
simple petition until the child's tongue forgot its cunning. 

My grandfather's neighbors were scattered over a wide space 
of country. The nearest one of them was half a mile away ; 



154 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

but distance only seemed to lend zest to their intercourse with 
one another. Lack of diversion also gave impulse to it. The 
drama they all helped to play was upon a narrow stage, with few 
acts ; and they, the actors in it, were so far apart that each stood 
out to. the others most conspicuous for the right or wrong render- 
ing of his part. Every incident and accident of one's daily life 
was, to his neighbor, what his costumes are to the player in the 
theatre, a sort of marking of him. His horse, his oxen, his 
wagon, and his dog identified him, like the wearing of a stage 
garment; and all his incomings and outgoings, all the ways of 
his household, were most familiar to his townspeople. Sunday 
noonings made neighbors ; the courtesies of hayings and harvest- 
ings brought them together ; and the leisure of winter revealed 
each to the other. They were compelled to be dependent upon, 
and so kind to, one another, — these simple, isolated people. 
They found relief Irom the restraint of labor and the suppression 
of their working days in their holiday garrulousness, and their 
eao'er recos-nition of everv other man and woman as their neio-h- 
l:>or. When clad in their best suits, with a little respite from 
toil, their whole natures seemed to rebound; and silent, stern 
men became eager chatterers. Very simple gossip it was, mainly 
of herds and crops and town affairs. They thronged the meeting- 
house steps on Sundays, gathered in knots about the village 
stores, and never failed on the highway to salute one another 
with much speech. The smallest mishap to the one was speedily 
known to the rest, and this large recognition came back manifold 
in sympathy. 



NEIGHBORS. 155 

Extreme deference was exacted from children to parents, and 
from youth to old age. Amongst the men there was little social 
assumption, save that the Ijest thinkers, known as such, took 
unto themselves a certain boldness of speech. Their salutations 




followed custom, and their common talk ran in grooves ; but the 
mass of them were as strong in logic as their soil was in rock ; 
and they were almost as easily turned as the latter from their 
slow-formed opinions. They were weather-wise almost to accuracy, 
and foretold to one another the coming and shifting of storms. 



156 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Nothing could be quainter upon the highway than the meeting 
in midsummer of two anxious farmers in their high-backed 
wagons. They stopped, compared the size and state of their 
exposed crops ; and then fell to watching the clouds, each shading 
his eyes with his hand. Hardy, resolute, half-defiant, they had 
a sort of heathen aspect — these sons of and worshippers of the 
soil. Their hopes, and so their hearts, were bound up in the 
signs of sun and wind and cloud, and they naturally grew into 
such picturesque and harmless idolaters. 

The women of my grandfather's neighborhood were more given 
to social distinctions than the men. The wives of '' forehanded" 
farmers and professional men were apt to be somewhat exalted, 
or, in the speech of the times, "looked up to." This was because 
of a partial exemption from toil; and they lacked the intensity, 
the wild flavor, of those humbler women, who threw their whole 
strength and will into their vocations, and thus made themselves 
worthy of better things. What if these latter did seem like 
drudges, and grow hard and ugly to sight; the patience and the 
power and the will to do were still in them, and the price they 
paid for their fidelity gave a pathetic nobleness to the sacrifice. 

The w^omen were, as a class, religious. They were not emo- 
tional, busy, bustling Christians. They knew little about missions 
and Dorcas societies. There was not much poverty to tax their 
sympathies. They were learned in doctrines, firm of faith, and 
full of a simple reverence. They were never so fagged or bur- 
dened that they could not, on the Lord's day, lay aside their 
cares and toils,, and go up to His house. It ought to have been 



NEIGHBOUR. 157 

an easy thing for these women to enter into the kingdom. Their 
Hfe here was so hard Upon them that the life to come must have 
held out to their weary souls a picture, beyond all measure 
delightful, of the eternal rest, the everlasting peace of the true 
gospel. 

The meao-reness of their lot beu,ot in many of them a stinu;iness 
about dollars and cents ; but the most carnal-minded of them 
were truly reverent on the Lord's day ; and they all endured 
frost-bites and long sermons, in their unwarmed churclies, with 
a praiseworthy patience. Sweet to them was the hush of their 
restful Sabbaths. It was the sign and token to them of a Sabbath 
that should never end. 

When their" children were young, these ancient mothers had 
to clothe them with garments spun and woven l)y their own 
hands ; and for the daughtei's, as they grew up, table-linen and 
bedding were to l)e stored away for their "tixing out." In my 
grandmother's day this thrifty forecasting of fate was the custom 
in farmers' families, and she was deemed rich to whose treasures 
gifts of silver and china were also added. Daugliters were ex- 
pected to marry. Marriage brought extra care and toil to a 
woman ; but she did not shrink from that, for labor was her 
lot; and she of the humbler sort, to whom no suitor came, was 
quite sure to take up her narrower vocation as tailoress or dress- 
maker or household servant. It was tliought to be generous 
in a farmer to let his daughter " learn a trade," thus freeing 
lier from tlie heavier drudgeries of farm-work. There must 
have been cheapened lives, but there were, at least, no idle ones 

21 



158 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

amongst these women. They began their lustrous webs in early 
girlhood. They accepted their condition as they found it ; they 
did with all their might what the Lord gave them to do, and 
so were in their calling true livers. 

The tailoress, with her awkward goose, stitching and pressing 
coarse cloths into homely garments, grew gray-haired in the 
service of friendly neighbors. Her meagre pay, through long 
hoarding, rolled up with years. She got to be a house-owner 
and land-owner, and so a woman of repute and weight amongst 
others. Lucy and Hester were two such humble neighbors of 
my grandfather's. They were in middle life when I knew them-; 
two sisters, to whom their father, in dying, had left a life interest 
in his house and estate. This was the usual way in those days 
of providing for the old age of unmarried daughters ; not the 
most safe or generous way for them, but consistent with their 
training and habits of self-reliance. With health, they were sure 
to be self-supporting, and in sickness and old age they would he 
cared for, grudgingly it might be, in the rooms set apart for 
them in the old homestead. 

Lucy and Hester might have well dreaded any possible de- 
pendence upon their brother, a crabbed, morose man, whose surly 
nature seemed to infect his home and all its surroundings. It 
was a dismal, joyless-looking house. Seen from a distance, it 
had a most inhospitable look, unsoftened by any green, growing 
thing, uncorniced, unpainted, grim, cold, forbidding. The room 
of Lucv and Hester seemed to catch all the sunshine lying about 
it. Their goose was always pounding at seams, their tongues 



NEIGHBORS. 



159 



were always going in concert, and they were the busiest, cheeriest, 
pkimpest, most prosperous of old maids. They had money in 
the bank ; how much no one knew, but rumor added to it faster 
than their nimble fingers could ever have 
earned it, until they came to be esteemed 
rich women. People wondered wdiy they 
had never married, for they were fair- 
faced and womanly, and full of lovaljle- 
ness m their low degree. They were fond 

of children, and 
took several 
little boys to 
bring up, but 
somehow these 
all turned out 
b a d 1 y. One 
stole some of 
their h a r d- 
earned money, 
another tried 
to l)urn their 
house. People 
said the sisters 
were too easy 
with tiiem. It may be, after all, that thev had fallen upon their 
true vocation, and that they were jollier and more useful with their 
goose in hand than they would have been as wives and mothers. 




160 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Joseph their l:)rother did not mar their comfort much, for they 
were not in hi:^ power. His wife (hed early uf overw(.)rk, leaving 
her tasks and her discomforts as an inheritance to her daughter. 
This daughter, Abigail hy name, was a tall, thin, hut sweet-faced 
girl, who, when I first saw her, was drudging her life out for 
her cruel father. She had a lover in a well-to-do farmer from 
the next town, but she never married. The linen was all spun 
and woven and packed away ; the bridal dress was made ready, 
and then, one June day, she who was to have worn it was borne 
out to the tamily burial-place. 

Not long after the father died suddenly and unmourned. Then 
Lucy and Hester came into full possession of the farm. They 
took down the little sign " Tailoring done here" from their win- 
dow, planted lilacs and rose-bushes about the house, and trained 
a creeper over the frcjnt door. They did not make many changes, 
but somehow the dismal look went out of the place, and the cheer, 
which Ijefore was confined to their own one room, now seemed 
to pervade the whole house. They were become, for the country, 
ti'uly lich women ; but, from force of habit, they kept basting 
and stitching and pressing until their goose grew too heavy for 
them. Then, from being the two tailoresses who worked about 
the town, they passed into the two cheerful old sisters, whose 
serene latter years and calm end were a rest and a lesson to their 
weary neighbors. 

Very faithful to each other in their marriage relations were 
these ancient men and women. They were given neither to 
sentiment nor demonstration. The women promised to honor 



NEIGHBORS. 161 

and obey their husbands; and they did honor and ol)ey them, 
not with weak serviHty but with trust and wilHngness. The 
twain were truly yoked together to bear Hfe's burdens ; and, 
working side by side, year after year, they grew to be most 
helpful and needful and dear to each other. Theirs may not 
have been the highest type of marriage, but such as it was it 
made each a necessity to the other, and whatever it lacked in 
grace and beauty it made up in truth and stability. If there 
was in it any actual or implied degradation of woman, this was 
shown in the preference of sons over daughters in the disposition 
of their small estates. The thrift and " fixing out" of the latter 
were thought to l)e sufiicient for them, and the farm witli its 
belongings was given to the sons. As a sul)ject of contemplation, 
as a Sabbath picture divorce<l from toil, the pastoral, patriarchal 
lile of one of these ancient families has a Biblical aspect, — some- 
thing of the sweetness and simplicity of those historical house- 
holds of Abraham and Isaac and Jacol). It w^as tlie life of a, 
race of strong-minded, heroic, Christian laborers, who, from a, 
substratum of mental, moral, and religious strength, sent forth 
a stream of migration as potent as the rivers which take theii' 
rise from the granite rock of their farms. If the women had 
been put forward forty years, many of them would have lost what 
now seem their peculiarities, and with them their chief charm, 
under the weight of what we call our superior civilization. But 
there was a certain class, small in numbei' as it always is, whom 
no time nor circumstance could have spoiled. They were noble 
women, — women full of all maimer of well-doing ; fair to look 



162 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

upon, with the beatitudes stamped upon their features as upon 
the pages of a written book ; women who, walking in their 
humljle condition, meek and lowly, came to be looked upon as 
in a measure sanctified, and were called " mothers in Israel." 
Their faces, set heavenward, cling to memory like the portraits 
of painted madonnas. 

Other women there were, more worldly wise, under whose 
cunning hands the plainer women of the neighborhood were as 
potters clay, — my grandmother was of such, — sensible, handsome 
women, whom no measure of labor could belittle, — full of mag- 
netism and power and wide influence. 

The stories of many of these ancient home-workers, written 
out, would Ije so many leaves from that pioneer, formative life 
which so embellishes and enriches the early history of New 
England. They were home missionaries, who gave to their 
neighbors their unsalaried labor, and to posterity the fruits of 
their wide-sown humanities and Christian graces. I have seen 
a whole village uplifted l)y the superior nature of a single, grand, 
thinking, faithful, Cliristian woman. She was the wife of a 
poorly-paid country minister. Her home was meagre, but her 
love of beauty great. She was not therefore poor, for what the 
country could give to any woman it gave to her. Her field 
seemed narrow, for her abilitv was large ; but if her standard 
of living overreached that of her neighbors, her examjile stimu- 
lated their children to higher effort. Her mission was peculiar. 
-Analyzed, its integral parts were small, in its aggregate not 
greatly recognized at the time, afterwards felt. The life of this 



NEIGHBORS. 163 

well-poised woman, wide in creative power bnt narrow-gauged 
by circumstance, in aspect bare, in actual experience full of the 
sadness of suppression, went day by day into the children about 
her, and that scope which was denied to herself she helped to 
give through them to their posterity. 

She was neither stranded nor martyred. It was her vocation 
that, because of the nobility of her nature, she should shape 
those wdio copied after her. It was her lot that the self-sacrifice 
which was engrafted upon her other virtues should give to her 
life a pensive beauty ; that she should better others by a certain 
impoverishment of self. What she longed for and got not, guided 
by her, others found. Her glory was that her true being was 
not bound by circumstance. She was not simply a village woman, 
she was a citizen of the world, for in giving wider sphere to 
others, she was only committing to them that part of her higher 
life most worthy to be developed and remembered. 




SUNDAY. 



Dear, delicious, bygone country Sabbaths, how out of harmony 
. bustle and striving seemed with your days ! A woman minding 
her dairy or a farmer storing his hay made a scandal, and a certain 
decorous dignity was given to necessary labor. How the aspect of 
the landscape changed with the ending of the week's tasks ! In- 
divi<lual life tells in the country. Farmers digging in their 
fields, dairvwomen busy before their doors, loitering children, 

22 



lOG NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

working oxen, all motions begotten of labor are greatly missed 
when withdrawn. The stillness of the Habbath at my grand- 
lather's was almost oppressive. Not a worker was to be seen, 
hardly a loiterer, only the silent processes of nature went on 
in the deserted fields. There was something sul:)lime in this 
universal ovation of quiet to the sacredness of the day, in this 
giving to the Sabbath that full possession of rest ordained for 
it in its old creation. It was the instinct of a primitive and 
pure devotion, the spiritual expression of a people who knew of 
no compromise with duty. The keeping of the Lord's day meant 
with them a giving up of all work-day pursuits. The thougiits 
of many of them may have run in profane channels, but if so 
they gave no outward sign. If they forecasted to themselves 
plans for the coming week, they told not of it, and the most 
eager worker of them all fell readily into the subdued spirit 
of the day. 

The fai'mers used to sit much Ijy the windows of their living- 
rooms and look complacently over their fields. No wonder they 
loved their lands, for these had given l)ack, for yearly care and 
toil, an hundred-fold in health and delight. I seem to see the 
old miller, readv for meeting, lounging in a rush-l)Ottomed chair 
outside his little red cottage under the hill. The mill has stopped 
its clatter. Mollv loitei's with her pitcher at the spring, and 
the gray old house-dog lies on the door-stone snapping at flies 
in the sunshine. The minutest feature of that Sunday morning- 
picture comes back to me : the lazy drone of the bees about 
the hive under the cherry-tree; the row of sunflowers close by 



SUNDAY. 



167 



the garden -fence, tilting their faces up to the sun ; the garden 
itself, full of savory herbs ; and, above all, the trim, rotund 
miller, his ruddy face set off by a broad collar, and his meeting- 
suit untarnished by meal or Hour. He was always waiting there 
every sunny Sabbath morning, so that he became a permanent 
feature of the landscape as seen from my grand- 
father's porch-door. The unhewn flat stone step 
of that door was a cheerful place. Close 
by it were the cucumber-bed, the dairy- 
bench, and the l^eehives. No pans were 
put out to scald on Sunday, the unpicked 
cucumbers grew apace, and the bees rev- 
elled in blossoms. It was the In'ia-htest, 
homeliest, rankest spot al)out tlie house. 
A farm-house back-door is a para- 
dise for weeds, and there is beautv in 
all these unbidden y;rowths of the rank 
sou. They are overburdened with a wild 
scent, dense of foliage, deep of color, profuse 
of blossom, and prolific of seed. They locate them- 
selves humbly and have few friends ; but hardly one of them is 
without its use, and none of them would be unmissed from 
back-door vegetation. Here grew the unctuous cheeses of school 
repute ; the beggarly plantain, close up to the steps, good for 
woodland poisons ; edible dock and mustard, and many meaner 
weeds, redeemed by their riotous rankness. They were not 
worthless, for out from them came healina; and food and dves. 







168 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

They Avere not mean, for they were an outcropping of the force 
of the earth, and so were an efoquent miracle of the life of the 
year. 

The miller's Sunday suit cost much effort, from the first 
clipping of the wool of which it was made to the final handling 
of it by Lucy and Hester, the two tailoresses, who measured 
and stitched and pressed at the rate of two shillings per day. 
It did not fit well, but for wear and tear it was unsurpassed ; 
and its owner had the consciousness that it had been honestly 
paid for, and would not have for a long time to be renewed. The 
broad collars of the men were made of homespun linen, their 
boots were clumsy, their hands coarse and distorted by labor ; 
but they were sovereigns of the soil ; strono-, brave, honest 
men. 

The dress of the better-conditioned class of women was much 
finer. Many of them owned rich satins and brocades. This 
outlay was, however, only for once or twice in a Hfetime, and 
the heirlooms of imported stuffs which have come down from 
my grandmother were, without doubt, her show-dresses for 
many years. There was something sweet in this exalting by 
fine apparel of a mother of a household, in this hinting of vanity 
in these simple women, who would gladly have bought and worn 
the silken fabrics which they could not simulate in their own 
webs. 

Behold -the stately pomp of my grandmother's church-going. 
Jonathan brings the two-wheeled chaise to the front door, and 
out from the " spare room" comes a shinmier of l)lack satin and 



SUNDAY. 



169 



lace, and the figure of a woman, large, tall, white-haired, fair- 
laced, handsome, grand as any fashionable lady of to-day. In 
the hands which on the morrow are to help to do the family 
washing she carries a folded kerchief of fine quality, a hymn- 
book, and a sprig of Southern- wood. She looks, as I remember 
her, with no mark of earthly toil u])on her form and visage, 




like a quaint old portrait of a queen somewhere seen. Verily, 
what did this woman lose by the cheerful taking up of life's 
allotted burdens ? 

Wives and daughters of the less well-to-do farmers seldom 
owned more than one " best gown," and that of simple material ; 
but their clean frocks looked wonderfully well, and the cheeks 
of the lasses were brighter than any ribbons they could buy. 
They were pleasant to behold as they walked in procession. 



170 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

every Sunday, to the meeting-house. The wild country round 
about ran riot with vegetation, and they were a part of its 
brightness. 

Tliere was chance for romance in those churcli-lxjund walks, 
and many a well-to-do young farmer chose to go across the 
fields with his lass rather than by the dusty highway. At 
meeting-time, by the gate of almost every green lane stood a 
lumbering market-wagon, waiting for the '' gudewife" and her 
little ones, whilst the " squire" and the doctor passed by in 
pretentious chaise. The highway was tlironged with eager wor- 
shippers, — fathers and mothers, lads and lasses, manv little 
children, with here and there an old man or woman. All were 
resting, happy, reverent. When the crowd had reached the 
meeting-house, the women and children and young girls passed 
in ; but the fathers and older sons lingered around the porch, — 
the former to exchange greetings, the latter to stare at the 
blushing maidens. The young people were not free from that 
coc|uetry the seeds of which were sown in Eden, and wliich is 
as old as Eve. It took the girls a long time beforehand to adjust 
their simple dress. On Sunday mornings, Molly, the miller's 
daughter, used to plaster water curls upon her rosy cheeks. 
If her face was not adorned by them, she herself was truly made 
more lovely b}^ this simple tribute to the church-door homage 
of her rustic lover. 

The meeting-house was a quaint old structure, a fair specimen 
of ];)uildings of its class in those days. It had the hanging, 
cylindrical, sounding-board ; high pulpit, with its trap-door ; 



SUNDA Y. 171 

railed altar ; broad galleries ; double row of small windows ; and 
square pews, — the whole built of plain, unpolished wood. It was 
not planned by skilful architects, yet, despite the ugliness of 
this old meeting-house, there was about it a kind of solemn 
grandeur. It was lofty and roomy, and had the venerableness 
which long use gives to any structure. Cobwebs hung in its 
out-of-the-way corners ; age had richly stained the rude carvings 
of its useless sounding-board ; and curiously-twisted veins and 
knots had come out, in long years, all over the panels of its 
galleries. There is something pathetic in this creeping out of 
the veins and fibres of ancient wood — as if they were the soul 
of it — to meet the destroying touch of time. Bare also is the 
aroma of these dying woods, breathing out from such as are 
mellow and brown and streaked with age ; found only in old, 
unpainted buildings. 

On summer days, through the open windows of this ancient 
church came resinous breezes from the pine wood beyond it, 
sunshine, and the sounds of busy, ripening, summer life. It 
was filled also with a reverent spirit of worship, and l:)y them 
all it was glorified into a solemn and goodly temple. The 
coming up of the minister's white head from the trap-door, 
the nasal twang of the long-queued deacon dictating to his 
choir, the contortions of the fiddler, were all accepted as a 
part of the service, and the people were as unconscious of 
any element of the grotesque in their worship as they were 
rich in faith and divine presence. The musical directors of 
ancient choirs might not have been good singers, but they 



172 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

•were most devout choral worshippers of the Lord on the 
Lord's Day. Ancient meeting-houses had no chimneys, and 
the tiny foot-stoves of the women could not keep their bodies 
warm in wintei'. One can but think that perhaps the sturdi- 
ness of these ancient dames was in some measure due to the 
fact that the weakly ones were, in early life, wunnowed out 
by exposure to such hardy customs. 

My grandfather's old meeting-house on summer days was a 
picture-gallery, letting in rare landscapes through its windows. 
The meanest objects framed in these, and fixed by them upon 
a background of sky or verdure, became studies to tired, curious 
children, wdio let nothing pass by the doors unnoticed upon the 
visiltle highway. The stay-at-homes in the few neighboring 
houses were eagerly watched, and all the details of the houses 
themselves accurately scanned by them. They grew wise as 
to the habits and haunts of meeting-house spiders and bugs, 
and noted every bird-nested tree which could be seen from the 
pews. Everv object within range of vision they knew well l")y 
sight. Nothing escaped them but the doctrines of the minister's 
long discourses. 

What country-bred person will not recall with pleasure such 
unwitting Sunday studies of art, when he or she learned aerial 
perspective through the upper windows of a village church, and 
the best style of lawn-gardening from the landscape which 
stretched out from their lower panes to the horizon ? All the 
natural beauties of the neighborhood were revealed ; many secrets 
of form and sound and color were searched out until, throuu'h 



SUNDAY 



173 



these primary dealings with nature, a glimpse was given of the 
fulness and richness and glory of the universe. 

The old-time country pastors were greatly loved and respected 




by their people. They were treated with peculiar deference. 
They were accosted with humility and entertained with delight. 
They were poorly paid, but, like their parishioners, their habits 
were simple and wants lew ; and many of them eked out their 

23 



174 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

living by the use of land lent them by thrifty farmers. The 
Congregation alist ministers were the most learned men of the 
times ; generally close students, rigid in doctrine, stern in dis- 
cipline, and given to long, many-headed sermons. Other de- 
nominations believed less in especial training for the pulpit and 
more in what was termed " a call" to preach. Laymen left their 
ploughs and became exhorters ; and the genuine '' call" often 
developed rare power to control minds. The eloquence and 
success of some of these "called" preachers of my grandfather's 
neighborhood have passed into tradition. They showed an acute- 
ness in the selection and adaptation of texts which often proved 
the seed of great revivals. Said one of these pastors, venerable 
with age, as he bowed over the coffin of an old patriarch, named 
Jacob, who in the fulness of a healthy and honored old age had 
died suddenly in the night-time, " And when Jacob had made 
an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his leet into 
the bed and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his 
people." The utterance, the attitude, the aspect of the trenil)ling 
old pastor were perfect, and more potent than any sermon u}ion 
this desirable ending of a long and worthy life. At another 
time, leaning over the pulpit, he pointed to the shrouded form 
of a strong man, stricken down by the wayside, and exclaimed, 
in low and searching accents, " Who among you will give heed 
to this ? Who will hearken and hear for the time to come ?" 
Waiting, with solemn impressiveness, answer came to him in 
the sudden uprising of every member of the congregation. This 
inspired old man was gathered to his fathers. He was greatly 



SUNDAY. 175 

missed. Even little children mourned him, and for a long time 
the mention of his name brought tears. 

In those days seldom was an aged minister cast off 1:)y his 
people because of his years. He was more apt to be endeared 
to them by his infirmities, and his speech to grow weighty with 
them in proportion to his past work and experience. The defer- 
ence paid to him, especially by the young, was extreme. His 
learning, his freedom from coarser toil, his l:)etter attire, exalted 
the minister's vocation at any time of life ; and when to the 
superiority of it was added the venerableness of years, he became 
to them a true patriarch ; like the priests of old, as one ordained 
of God and not of men. 

My grandfather's minister, when I used to visit the farm, was 
a trembling old man, with broken voice ; but the thouo-ht of his 
dismissal never entered the mind of one of his hearers, and to 
talk of his death as a near probability cut their hearts as a 
personal bereavement. Gray-haired women spoke of him as 
belonging to a past generation. He had buried their parents, 
had given them in marriage, and brought his wisdom to bear 
upon the good and evil experiences of their after-life. He had 
been an eloquent man, and the inspiration of his speech had 
not yet quite left him. Indeed, there could be no eloquence 
more effectual than the simple appeals which came from the pious 
hearts and truthful lips of such well-tried pastoi'S. From living 
so long with one people, they grew into their lives. There could 
be no joy or sorrow in the parish in which the beloved pastor 
was not called to share. The average sermons of those days, 



176 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

measured b}- rules of rhetoric, might, many of them, seem bare ; 
but most of them were strong in logic, and they were all full 
of heart and truth, and so of power. 

At noon, between Sunday services, the people scattered ; in 
winter, with their lunch-baskets, amongst the nearest farm- 
houses ; in summer the mothers, with their little ones, did the 
same, whilst the sturdy farmers lolled on the green. Lads and 
lasses strolled into the fields, where lovers sat down under the 
maples and oaks, or the willows by the brook-side. Children 
and sober maidens, like Hannah, were apt to turn into the 
churchyard. ]\Iany of the meeting-goers had some precious 
spot in that earth, and they never seemed to tire of reading the 
legends on the unpretending stones. 

After the hour's nooning came the afternoon's service, just 
as long and strong in doctrine as that of the morning, and woe 
betide tlic uneasy youngster or dozing iarmer upon whom the 
tithingman's watchful eye might fall. Sweet were the homeward 
walks, wdien lovers loitered and parents grew less austere. The 
rest of the day was wellnigh past, but its peace lingered. Its 
waning light fell with a soft glow upon fields and highway and 
home-bound worshippers. The latter, lor a few transient hours 
freed alike from the cares which were past and the cares which 
were to come, grew kindly affectionate one towards another. 
This new-born life was decorous and sweet. Children joined 
one another ; young hearts went out to meet young hearts ; and, 
at the end of every green lane, neighbors parted with hand- 
shakes and good wishes. While this pleasant pageant was pass- 



SUNDAY. 



l\ 



ing from the highway, the herds came up from the pastures. 
The duties of the new week crowded up to the twilight of 
the old Sabbath, and shortly the highway was deserted and 
silent. 





HE flavors of fruits which 3^011 have 
eaten in (hildhood strangely chng to 
yon. Yon taste them in memory, and 
yonr month Hterally waters for them. 
Yon never get such apples now as Bill 
and Joe nsed to carry to the village 
school. They came, most likely, from 
a hoard in the hay-mow ; if so, they 
Avere stolen from the best trees of 
some farmer's orchard. Happy the boy 
or girl who innocently ate of the mellowed 
apples of such a hoard, wdiich had been forced into ripening in 
their nest of dried grass. Their flavors were shut in by darkness, 
and their scents and tints, which would have exhaled in daylight, 
passed permanently into them. Their pulp melted and trickled 
throuu'h the lingers of eaters, with a deep color and a tar-reaching 




OLD TREES. 179 

odor. Brought out from the pockets of boys and girls, they 
were as bright and fresh as the eyes which longed for them. 

Straying through a field or pasture in childhood, you have 
come upon a wild tree loaded with fruit, of which you have 
plucked and eaten. You were hardy and hungry, and they 
seemed to you the l:)est apples you had ever tasted. Passing 
that wav in after-years, you call to mind this fruit's high relish, 
and are curious to try it again. You find the tree, half rotten, 
but its live limbs still bearing. You search in vain for apples 
like the old ones. You fling them from you by the dozens, for 
you find them all, whether on the tree or on the sod, sour and 
knotty and mean. You wonder whether the fine flavor has gone 
out of the apple with the decay of the tree, or a keen appre- 
ciation has gone out of you. No matter which ; once you liked 
it, and the tradition will always be a real and pleasant thing. 
Fruit ta^stes better picked up from a sod. A yellow apple bedded 
in a tuft of green grass, besprinkled with dew, and crisp with 
early ripeness, palatable as you snatch it, may be a crabbed thing 
when Ijought from a huckster's stall. I used to eat freely of 
sweets and sours in my grandfather's orchard, and daily made 
its round, thrusting aside the grass for windfalls, puckering my 
mouth with acrid juices, flinging clubs and stones at favorite 
branches, and filling my pocket with fresh-Mien fruits. Very 
few of its apples were positively uneatable. This one might set 
you]' teeth on edge, or make your throat tingle, Ijut you were 
likely, the very next time you passed the tree that bore it, to 
snatch at the same branch for the sake of the smart. Apples 



180 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

which, when carried into the house and left lying about for a 
day or two, were thrown away as useless for cooking, picked 
freshly fallen from the earth had a keen, spicy tang, pleasant if 
sparsely taken. 

There is hardly any wild apple so worthless than in it does not 
lurk a latent sweetness, waiting to be let loose by some conditi(~)ii 
of time or place, a racy and transient flayor to be caught on the 
wing. A toothraark sufficed for some of my grandfather's apples, 
for others a single mouthful ; many were to be half eaten, — 
wormy windfalls, for instance, and the fruits of certain trees with 
sodden, watery cores. Others, mild and fine-grained, were 
relishable close up to the hulls. A few, compact with malic 
worth, seemed utterly to dissolye. Such fruit was to be foun^l 
here and there in all old orchards, the delight of children, and 
oddly named by farmers' wiyes, pudding-sweets, long-noses, red- 
cheeks, and the like ; wild apples, nol large, but well-shaped, 
finely colored, and of good grain. Paths went straight from the 
l»ack-doors to these trees, and the grass under them was matted 
and tangled. Trails were apt to lead from them to gaps in the 
walls, and much of their plumpest fruitage found its way into 
the hoards of thieying boys. The rich fiayor of them all was 
due to their utter freshness. The true aroma of any fruit comes 
from the life of it, — life drawn from the sunshine, the showers, 
the air, and soil of its own locality. When you pluck it it begins 
to die. It follows, then, that the products of your own soil giye 
to you alone their true ownership, and the finest reward of your 
tillage is that to you only can they offer their unim|)aired juices. 



OLD TREES. 181 

I knew a tree once — old when I first saw it, dead now — which 
stood in an angle of a country garden. Close in the corner was 
a rhubarb-root, and along the fence a row of currant-bushes ; 
rank growths all of them, but good hiding-places for windfalls. 
Never was a tree so beset and persecuted as this. Its hitjlier 
Ijranches always hung full of forked sticks ; the hard-trodden 
sod under it was thick with leaves, and the currant-bushes and 
rhubarb-root were trampled and torn. Three or four of its 
huge branches stretched over the fence, and the smart-weed 
bed underneath them was always hunted by eager children. 
Long poles were lying about outside, which, after all the apples 
had been knocked from these overhans-ino; branches, w^ere slyly 
thrust under the fence for more, and this was called " hooking" 
by the young pilferers. This apple-tree made early risers of 
the children of the house which owned it ; and after a storm 
sharp was the contest for the gathering of its windfalls. It 
had a slow decay, a natural kind of ageing, and left off bearing 
limb by limb. The sparser its fruit was the more precious it 
grew, and the last few apples of the season were always the 
best esteemed of all. They were truly wonderful apples, — 
piquant things, — small, bright yellow without,, mottled with 
brown-edged, crimson spots ; snow white and sparkling within ; 
tasting best when knocked out, late in autumn, from the fork 
of some high-up branch. It was only a great, wild apple-tree, 
but it grew into the life of the house, and the whole summer 
long gave to it a surprising measure of beauty and comfort. 
Its blossoms were of pink and white, the }n"ettiest of their kind, 

24 



182 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and they perfumed a whole viHage. The setting of its fruits 
was tiie delight of all the neighbors' children, and the giving 
of them, when ripened, Ijecame a hospitality. They were thick 
and beautiful amongst the green leaves, and the underlying sod, 
enriched by them, was the best-beloved spot of the wdiole garden. 
Ungrafted trees have a riotous way of growing, making up 
in size what they lack in fruitage; and the thinnest-bearing 
of them, when in blossom, perfumes the air as sweetly as the 
best. The trees in my grandfather's orchard which bore the 
meanest fruit seemed to have the most and brightest blossoms, 
and for a few days were the glory of the landscape. You can 
never forget the scent of apple-blossoms ; nor, when once seen, 
the beauty which is given to plain things by them. iVn old 
apple-orchard has a ])athetic interest. Its trees decay slowly, 
lingering after those who planted them, with gnarled trunks 
and distorted limbs, keeping watch over the ruins of deserted 
homesteads. If you see a few, solitary, half-dead apple-trees in 
a field, or stumps of trees buried in suckers, near them you will 
be quite sure to find a cellar, — filled with stones and Ijricks and 
tangled wild-growth, — the site of an ancient home. You may 
find these dying old trees overhanging the walls of grass-grown 
country highways. If you will dislodge their tumbled fruit from 
between the stones, you will often be well repaid by their wild 
and racy flavor. Even if you cannot eat them, they are pleas- 
ant to look ujion ; and the tree which, in all lands, best holds 
its own, which seems nearest to you, is the tree which has always 
been a generous giver to you, the homely, grateful, apple-tree. 



OLD TREES. 183 

Best of all orchards, my grandfather's, full of great trees, 
waxing old and weak ; with their trunks rotted, their barks 
shaggy, their limbs all dead at the ends. Dear old orchard, 
with your smooth turf, your many fierce-fruited trees, your few 
but sufficient ones bearing aj^ples of rare worth ! Going back 
in memory to your gathering, I walk straight to the sweet trees 
and the sour trees of your best repute. I hear the thud of 
your brimful carts, pouring their loads into the press, and see 
busy hands heaping up the fallen fruit. The gifts, that the 
summer suns and winds and rains have given to you, lie beautiful 
upon the earth, in balls of crimson, and green and gold. Your 
yearly mission is over, and the air is fragrant with the life that has 
passed into them and out of you, with the growing and ripening 
of the year. I forget, — the thing was and is not ; the harvest 
was bountiful, and was gathered in ; the trees waxed old and died. 

On the side of the orchard nearest the house a row of later- 
planted trees had been grafted, but with so little care as to stock 
that their fruits were no better than cross-breeds, with a strong- 
leaning to native wildness. Moreover, the trees themselves, too 
old for the process, did not take to it. They were unhealthy and 
tricky of bearing, and seemed to be trying to thrust off their 
superadded branches. Many of the oldest trees were rotten to 
the core, yet still persisted in bringing to the orchard their yearly 
gift of leafage, flower, and fruit. After a strong wind it was 
always feared that one or more of them would be found prostrate 
upon the ground. The fall of one sent a thrill of sorroAV through 
the household. It was sure to have been endeared by some tender 



184 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

association, had been marked by a name, and was not liglitly 
to be parted with. It was pitilul to look at its branches, heaped 
and crushed, covered with their h\st greenness ; its trunk jagged 
and rotten ; a worthless wreck to be put out of sight. 

The wild pear was a hard, uneatable thing, properly called 
choke-pear. Unlike the apple, it never surprised you by any 
palatable variations, and, save that the housewives sometimes 
stewed it into a tolerable preserve, it was of little use. 

The warden cherries of ancient homesteads were less untamed, 
more serviceable than the pears. Almost every garden held 
two or three trees, the fruit of which was much esteemed lor 
cookery. This cherry was round,- plump, richly red, and thor- 
oughly relishable when plucked from the sunny side of a well- 
tended tree. A profuse bearer, this tree, with its high contrast 
of fruit and glossy, dark-green leaves, was an ornamental tiling, 
often standing in the front yard of the house. It was apt to 
straggle in its growth and get shaggy as to its bark, but was 
pleasant to look upon from its white blossoming until it was 
stripped by the frost. It was an early bloomer, thrusting out 
its snow-white petals before its leaf-buds had burst open, almost 
the first floral gift of spring to the quickening life of the garden. 
All cherrv-blossoms have an untamed look and scent, as if in 
them the richness and flavor which goes into later flowers had 
gotten snow-I)Ound. They are very dainty ; they come suddenly, 
and flutter and fall and melt away, as if they were really born 
out of frost-work. Little children used to carry sprays of them 
to school, and later they beset the trees for Iruit, fighting with 



OLD TREES. 185 

the birds for their short-lived harvest. I remember two great, 
scraggy, old trees, hard to climb, whose close-set branches nipped 
like a vice, but which held, quite up in the sky, fruit full of 
imprisoned sunshine. For several weeks, in cherry-time, they 
were noisy trees. There were always two or three children 
wedged between their forked branches, who chattered and ate 
and kept a flutter amongst the flocking birds. 

Half-way between the house and woodland was a wild cherry- 
tree, which l;)ore Ijlossom and fruit with a riotous profuseness. 
The wild cherrv was a savage of its kind. This one rose straight 
as an arrow from a heap of rocks ; a tall, handsome tree. The 
rocks were matted with sumachs and blackberry-bushes, and 
the place was said to be snaky ; yet it was lovely with its tree 
and shrubbery and white flowers, and was always strewn, in fruit- 
time, with broken twigs and forked sticks. The wild cherry 
is a prettier tree every way tlian the tame red. It is round- 
trunked, pyramidal, glossy-barked, with breezy, profuse, white 
blossoms and small black, graceful, clustered fruit, and it l:)inds 
up in its fibres rare, healing juices. Black-cherry trees offen 
stand thick along old walls, unnoted by the farmer until quite 
grown. They give to the rocks in spring a beauty which the 
sumach, with its crimson leaves, gives in autumn ; for a few days 
they outline a field with their pure white, })endulous blossoms. 
Their fruit looks toothsome, but is pungent and acrid ; yet, like 
the wild apple, when plucked from the sunny side of a tree, in 
field or pasture, it would not fail there to please you. Nobody 
ever plants wild cherry-trees, but they spring u|) freely in out- 



186 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

of-tlie-way places. Close by fences and in rock-lieaps, they easily 
escape hostile ploughs, and thrust themselves picturesquely out 
of the rul)bish of a field into the features of a landscape. They 
are hardier and less liable to disease than the garden species, and 
the balsam which runs in their veins is not of more worth than 
are their varied aspects of beauty. 

Plums were once raised with little care in extreme New 
England. Peaches were also an infrequent growth. Black gum 
has nearly killed out the former ; severe winters the latter. 
Like all later-maturing fruits, ripened under the slow processes 
of a New England sunnner, the plums were pulpy, fine-grained, 
and delicious. Thev are to be reo-retted, as the one thino; which, 
in this bleak climate, simulated a tropical fervor. My grand- 
father's half a dozen plum-trees, when last seen, were black, 
blighted and unsightly ; and the single peach-tree had dwindled 
down to suckers, sprung from the past winter's blight. 

But after all the tree which has best stood wear and tear, 
which presents itself to me, seeking for it, with the most familiar 
aspect, is the butternut-tree by the well. No matter how I'otten 
its core is, how ragged its branches, I love its old age even better 
than I did its youth. Next to that my heart goes out to the 
trees, spared by the woodman's axe, in the woodland beyond the 
orchard. I saw a strong man once crying like a child, because 
of the cutting down of an old tree upon his lawn. He said all 
his children had played under it, and it was a part of his life. 
I felt sorry for him, for his grief l:)rought back to me the morn- 
ing when I missed my great maple from my chamber window, 



OLD TBEES. l; 




and, looking 
out, saw it lying, ma- 
il- 'Sr jestic, but smitten, across 
I, my summer garden. Of all 
my trees I loved this one best. It had been 
'' cut down by mistake, and as it lay, with its 
leaves withering in the sunshine, it seemed like 
a murdered thing. It was lost from my window ; it was gone 
from the landscape ; it had been cruelly torn from the reniem- 



'iSii'l'iK'' 

f'4 



188 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

bered image of a dead child, — this speechless yet speaking thing, 
which had grown into my heart. 

Trees have their social aspect. Many have been intimately 
known by me ; solitary trees, and clumps of trees, and forests 
of trees, memorable by association. How you love to recall the 
trees which grew about your old homestead ! You were drawn 
to them by little things. In the forked branch of this you 
watched a bird's nest, out of the rotten trunk of that grew a 
thrifty fern, here you perched aloft, there you swung. In varied 
ways the rugged old trees catered to your young delights and 
wants, and grew beautiful and dear to you. Trees were my 
childhood companions, constant to me and I to them. I learned 
their tricks of costume and ways of growth. I cannot this day 
tell in what dress I loved them best ; whether in the tender 
green of spring, the deeper colors of later days, the crimson 
and gold and russets of autumn, or the soft grays of the dying 
year. There were groups of trees in pasture and lowland at 
my grandfather's, which are joys of memory, because of rare 
shadings and colors which were cast upon and overlapped into 
them by the passing of the seasons. There were four trees 
standing in the middle of the rocky pasture whose interlocked 
Ijranches were unfolded, like the pages of a richly-illuminated 
book, by the autumn ripening of their leaves. Standing by 
themselves, they were the most prominent things to be seen, 
bright as Hame in the sunshine. They were yearly emblazoned 
upon the s;ray pasture, and it was as if the condensed richness 
and ripeness of the year had |)0ured into them its old wine. 



OLD TREES. 189 

All woods have their speech : grim old woods, tangled and 
matted an<;l solemn and dark ; treacherons woods, wet and mossy 
and full of pitfalls ; odorous woods, bright with ferns and flowers 
and streaks of sunshine. 

Looking at ])ainted forests, there are apt to come to me things 
never put upon canvas ; such as the sweet odor of a smoking, 
resinous wood, caua-ht at midnight from a burning forest ; a 
subtle, far-reaching, never-to-be-forgotten scent, the breath of 
dying pines. With the scent comes also a little cottage planted 
against a savage background of blackened trees and smouldering 
sod, a weird forest night scene, burned into a child's imagination. 
No country habitation could seem more alone than this house 
at midnight, close by the highway, in the heart of a forest, 
dimly disclosed by moonlight, its lamps all out, its tenants 
sleeping, so lonely, so fragile, so exposed, and yet so peaceful, 
so strong, so safe, respected by man's humanity, watched over 
by God's providence. 

Of all voices of the woods and the night, the low wail of 
the whippoorwill is the saddest. It was a bird of ill omen to 
farmers' wives, and the woodland passed into evil repute because 
it was haunted by one. Any sound thrust in a forest upon the 
silence of night is positive, and what would be unnoticed in the 
daytime becomes a terror or a support to the benighted traveller. 
The thud of his horse's hoofs and the rattle of his wheels do not 
shut out the slightest crackle of twigs, and he hears many strange 
sounds which he cannot disentangle from the darkness. 

I hear, as if just passing it, on my way to my grandfather's. 



190 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



in the heart of the long forest, the lapping of a pond at night 
upon its shores. The horse shies at the waves and the driftwood, 
the wheels grind into the sand. ' The brido;e at the outlet is said 
to be treacherous, and the outlet itself is sullen and dark. In 
the mile-away horizon the moonlight brings out the one little 
cottage by the inlet, within a stone's throw of which its owner 
went down through a yawning breathing-hole, into which he 
had driven from across the pond one cold winter's night. My 
companion tells the old story, and adds to it later accidents. 
Meanwhile we near the bridge and the inlet, which seems to 
yawn to swallow us in. We urge the horse carefully, and he, 
with half-human instinct, plants his feet reluctantly u}ton the 
bridge. It sags to one side, and the water ripples past the 
wheels. We hold our breaths for a minute, and then the pas- 
sage is made. It was a foolish thing to do, l)ut the risk gave 
to me a remembered rare voice of a solitary old wood. 








TGTTCH^oi_^, 



EE the children as they used to come 
from the village school, — a noisy 
little mob, ripe for mischief. A 
wagoner drives along. The boys 
swarm upon his cart like bees, 
tangled together and dangling behind with scarred and mud- 
stained feet. The farmer either " whips behind" or leaves the 
struggling mass to disentangle Vty a gradual dropping off. The 
childroi who were left stop a moment. Poised, expectant, thev 
all stand, until some foremost fellow plunges his broad bare feet 
into the hot, soft sand, scoops it along, and flings it aloft. A'way 
they all rush, with a whoop and a hurrah, ploughing along the 
road, half smothered by the dust thev fling about them. 

Nothing could be more charming than the groups of school- 
bound children in early summer mornings, simply clad, chattering 
like magpies, makins; the air I'iny:; with their laus;hter. Their 



192 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

prattle was mostly of flowers and birds ; of the treasures of fields 
and pastures and ^^oods, and their many little adventures in their 
close dealings with nature. They were as hardy and untrained 
as the mullein and hardhack and wild rose of the unploughed 
roadside ; and they were as sweet to look upon as were the 
blossoms of these weeds. 

In summer the scents of fields and woods used to get into 
the school-rooms ; especially of the ferns, which sprang up all 
along the stone walls, by the roadside, and in the damp, shady 
corners of the fields. What country-bred child does not re- 
member these tender, dainty roadside ferns which the (diildren 
used to stick in the seams of their desks, and into every available 
crack in the school-house walls ? Beds of tliem grew crisp in 
a field back of the school-house in my grandfather's district, 
where the grass around them was above the heads of the smaller 
children. The man who owned this field was at war with the 
scholars, for thev would pluck the ferns, and the way to these 
led through his tallest grass. A wild cherry-tree stood in the 
centre of this field, and its ragged wall was covered with berry- 
bushes. When it was mowed scythes were trip[)ed l>y hard- 
trodden trails, and the old farmer was heard to say to his men 
one summer that " the young cusses" had cut up his field like 
a checker-board. He hacked up the fern-l:)ed. cut down the 
cherry-tree, and tore up all the wavside berrv-bushe.-^. But dear 
old Mother Nature outwitted him, and the next year the ferns 
came up again as rank as ever; strawljerries and wild-fiowin's 
ii'i'ew where the trees and bushes had been : tlu' eau,'er cliildren 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 



W. 



made new trails after new tilings, and crisscrossed the field worse 
than ever. 

There was something delicious to the children in their stolen 
marches upon this forbidden field. I see them now, leaping at 
recess past the gap in the wall (that gap which would never 
stay mended) into their trails, neck dee}) in grass, tumbling and 




tripping as they went. 
Their faces are beauti- 
ful, framed in memory 

by the ferns and grains and grasses of long since dead harvests; 

they bring with them an Indian summer afterglow of sentiment. 
The school-house yard was a sunny spot, defined bv four flat 

corner-stones, good for the game of goal, crisscrossed by two 

hard-trodden paths, and littered by loose-lying sticks and pebbles. 

Its stone wall was jagged, thistle-lined, and much beset by bees. 



194 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

In the corner next to the school-house was an ever-present gap. 
You know how handy such wall-holes used to be in your child- 
hood ; how your bare feet clung to the smooth rocks, which had 
tumbled to the other side. You have doubtless yourself helped 
make them in pasture boundaries, or been the bruised victims 
of unpremeditated breaks. Nobody ever seemed to know how 
this hole came. It was a school mystery, incessantly mended 
and as incessantly undone. 

Close by this gap was one corner of the goal-ground. The 
lively game of goal was played by the girls at recess, the largest 
ones claiming the stones and right of way. They flew eagerly 
from rock to rock, cheeks aglow and hair streaming. The smaller 
girls either watched them or strayed alongside forbidden fields 
for wild forage. The game of goal was too tame for the lioys, 
wdio, when their turn came, rushed uproariously out, skimmed 
along the walls, tumbled with somersaults into the fields, hurrahed 
up and down the highways, irresponsible, dirty, happy ; seldom 
getting through recess without a free fight. The small boys 
played marbles on the sunny door-steps, or exchanged pocket 
treasures around the school-house corner. When the teacher's 
knock put an end to the uproar, they tumbled in as they had 
tumbled out, marvellously disentangling at the threshold of the 
school-room. 

The teachers of the winter schools were a mixed race. Well- 
educated farmers sometimes eked out their incomes and filled 
up their winter leisure by teaching school. Such were always 
?avage disciplinarians. A boy seemed as tough of hide to them 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 195 

as " Cherry" and " Brindle," who drew their carts. They were 
fertile in punishments and cruel with the ferule, — green, birchen, 
supple ferule, used for the tingling and blistering of so many 
outer integuments. These teachers were apt to be nasal readers, 
but they were infallible in spelling, geography, and book-keeping. 
They were not much given to oral instruction, Ijut followed one 
up closely in the multiplication table, abbreviations, and laws 
of punctuation. 

The village teachers were called masters and mistresses, for 
many of them a fitting title, mimic despots as they were. Often 
bright young men, for the sake of the meagre pay, taught these 
schools. They were apt to have a hard time of it, and had to 
be strono- of muscle and will not to get " smoked out," or un- 
mercifully bothered by uncouth tricks. The winter schools were 
rough. Farmers' boys, freed from work, many of them grown 
to man's estate, flocked to them with slate and copy-book and 
text-books, to lay up that stock of school learning which was 
to make them oracles in the villao-e stores, moderators in town- 
meetings, and representatives to general courts. They were 
difficult to manage ; puzzled the master with hard sums and 
knotty questions, and roared out their conceits like young giants. 
They stamped through the snowy entries, shaggy-coated, puffing 
like engines, rubbing their frosty ears ; uncouth, yet honest, 
patient, and full of a rude humanity ; worthy, hard-working- 
farmers that were to be. Here and there one different from 
the rest, a "queer fellow," so called, drifted apart from his school- 
mates, so that, years after, they were wont to turn wearily from 



196 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

their ploughs and boast that in boyhood they had mated Avith 
a famous man. 

The zeal of all of them was great after learning. Their 
patience was pathetic. The dullest of them hacked away at 
their books as doggedly as they did in summer at the rocky 
soil. Passing along the highway in winter evenings, you might 
behold, through the exposed windows of farm-houses, young boys 
deep in their tasks, by the light of tallow-candles and open fires ; 
and it was pleasant to see the '' old folks" watching them with a 
sweet pride, only surpassed by the conceit of the young learners. 
The books they used were few and seldom changed ; but they 
seemed then to be good enough, and the recitations from them 
were the best of their kind. These district schools were nurseries 
of talent and ambition. Their conditions of severity and re- 
striction have sent forth great and famous men. The most 
laggard scholars were yearly bettered by them, and the bright 
ones got from their three or four winter months of hard study 
as much as most boys and girls get nowadays from nine months' 
tuition. 

The discarded books of these schools are often foimd in the 
closets and garrets of old farm-houses, with their thick brown 
covers and worm-eaten leaves. Their text is of quaint lettering, 
but their sense is unabated by time, and one feels tempted to 
go back to the use of these potent things of the past, whose 
obsolete rules have taught so many wise men. Turning them 
over and following them is like talking with friends who, long 
ago, helped to make us what we are. Did you never, in later 



THE DISTBICT SCHOOL. 197 

life, run across a reader (long since out of print) which was used 
by the schools of your youth ? Its pages seem as famihar to 
you as nursery rhymes, and you feel towards it as tenderly 
almost as if it were a human thing, — this stilted old reader, 
whose solid literature was one of the stumljling-hlocks of your 
childhood. You have not forgotten its standard declamations 
and dialogues, thrillingly rendered by loud-voiced boys and girls ; 
and the oft-repeating of its much prose and rhyme maxle you 
forever intimate with them. The names of men who made your 
school-books are household words to you, and when you would 
teach your children, your tongue trips upon the rules wliich they 
taught you. 

What unpenned literature is bound up in books ! The stories 
printed on their pages are often less pathetic, less tragic, than 
the I'eal life scenes which touch or sisrht of them can brina; back 
to you. I confess to an awe in handling ancient books, and 
follow their tender, mouldy pages as if I were in the presence 
of their past owners. The fading names upon their flv-leaves 
have the helpless significance of all memorials of the dead. 
There is a sad delio;ht in rummaorino; throuo-h an old librarv, — 
in dragging out from corners and upper shelves volumes tucked 
away as worthless, but redeemed into preciousness by past use 
of them. Books that you used in A^our school-days, you curiously 
turn over for the marks you left in them. Gift-books, which have 
been thrust aside, are taken back, for the memory of him or 
her wdio wrote upon their Ijlank leaves pleasant messages. Guide- 
books and books that you read upon journeys thrust their titles 



198 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

upon you, and set you again on your travels. Books once read 
Avith friends quicken your memories of social life. Books with 
strange names in them, picked up from stalls, affect you like 
human waifs ; and ancient books, of quaint dialect, like ghosts 
of the past. But lielbre all others are the books which never 
get tucked away in corners ; those which were read last by the 
loved and lost. How many have such, with marks left in ; pencil 
touches ; a stray letter ; names scrawled, — pitifully meagre, lui- 
satisfactory traces of hands which can never again turn them I 
Take from me my books, most of them, if you will, but do not 
dare to touch the precious volumes in blue and gold turned 
slowly over bv the fingers of my dying child. They left no 
soil on the page, but their sacred imprint is no less indelifile 
to me. Dear old books, all of you, — no matter how much your 
printed leaves lie, the overlapping text, legible alone to faithful 
love, can never be false ! You may grow mildewy and musty, 
l)ut ever tender and beautiful shall be, the associations with 
Avhicli vou are Ijound. 

Ancient schoohhouses were not built for comfort. Their seats 
were high and narrow, their desks awkward and mconvenient. 
Their chimnevs were large, fireplaces broad and smoky, and the 
floors in iront of them were sure to be worn with the tranq) of 
uneasily-seated children, who in winter went up to them in never- 
ending procession. The worst-used place in the whole district 

was the school-room. Youno'sters hewed and haclvcd at their 

o 

desks with a revengeful persistence. The plastering of the walls 
was covered with rude inscriptions, and the ceiling overhead 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 



199 



bespattered with ink and paper squibs. No boy or ^irl ever 
plead guilty of any of these mars and blots, but many additions 
went each term into the aggregate of this spontaneous frescoino-. 
The old school-room in my grandfatlier's district was full of 




scrawls and names and quaint maxims. Almost every teacher 
had his or her profile in it, done in tolerable outline by roguish 
fingers. No law had force against this custom. The scribbling 
of the school-room had become a second nature to the scholars, 
and it seemed less culpable because the rough, blotched walls 



200 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

upon near inspection resolved themselves into art exjionents of 
child-life ; made up of outline leaves and flowers and birds and 
scraps of rhyme, — crude pictures of what had gone into and 
out of the children's days. The marring of school-rooms thus, 
in one sense, becomes their embellishment. ■ The names, whittled 
indelibly into desk-lids and door-posts, and all the traces of by- 
gone child possession, — these are the true ghosts of scholars and 
school-days that are past. ' 

In summer the rows of small, opposite windows in old school- 
houses, open upon the children's necks, inured them to draughts ; 
and nothing could be purer than the breezes which blew from 
everv quarter of the heavens into these wide-opened rooms. In 
winter up the big chimneys went most of the heat, and with it 
all the bad air ; whilst throuo;h cracks and chinks without number 
blew the l)itina; but health-oivina; north wind. It was hard on 
little boys and girls in corner-seats ; but then they were all well 
wrapped up in homespun suits, and Avere always going to the 
fire to warm their tingling fingers and toes. Every comer into 
the room let in a blast of cold air. At recess the boys tumbled 
into the snow, and came back shaking it from their garments. 
Two or three deep in a semicircle they hugged the fireplace, and 
sucked at snow-balls crushed in their half-frozen fingers till 
the tap of the master's ferule sent them unwillingly to their 
desks. 

The floor aliout the fireplace was always soppy in winter with 
incoming snow, and in summer was sure to be wet from slate- 
washings and the careless upsetting of di]>pci's. Close by it. 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 201 

upon a low iDench, stood the water-pail, the tillino- of which on 
summer days was a rare privilege to the older girls. The spring 
was quite far away, close by the edge of a wood. It was a prettv 
sight to see them Ijursting into the school-room, staggering under 
their load : rosy, laughing, with their api-ons full of flowers and 
mint from the brookside. The water of the spring had a snakv 
repute, but it was freely drank of by all the children, and in 
various ways catered largely to their comfort and delight. On 
hot sunnner days the larger girls used to splash it about, and it 
would trickle down the aisles to scatter in dust-bound globules 
over the dirigv floor. 

Peculiar, positive, and unlike any other, was at night the, 
summer odor of these school-rooms. The thick dust, srround 
flne by the tramping of restless feet, elsewhere musty, here 
seemed to be scented with the withered roses and ferns and mint 
left behind them by the half-wild children. Apple-cores, scraps 
of paper, and bits of })encil were scattered about, and now and 
then the sweeper came across something from out the treasures 
of a boy's pocket. The latter often in school-hours found a wav 
to the floor, and got lodged in the teacher's desk. It was curious 
to look into the children's boxes, and see in them how mischievous 
boys and girls had whiled away the laggard hours : hoAV manv 
apples and ginger-cakes had been slyly eaten, and cul)l)v-houses 
built from books, unbeknown to the teacher. The desk of the 
latter, last locked, was always fragrant with confiscated fruit. 

The aspect of one of these rooms after the dav's work was 
over was tenderly suggestive. It was a place out of which a 



202 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

jocund life had gone, and the waste scattered aronnd was made 
up of such things as the children had gotten out of their stay 
in it. There was something poetical in this leaving behind them 
the scents of the weeds and blossoms which the_y had plucked, — 
the lading memorials of the delights of a day that had passed. 

The person who found solid comfort in the winter schools 
was that master who boarded 'round in country districts, and 
tasted the cream of kindness in formers' houses. He sat in 
the best seat, in the corner, through winter evenings, book in 
hand, reserved, prim, feared, if not hated, by the youngsters. 
His presence quickened the life of a household. Best dishes 
were brought out, and dainties came upon the table. The " fore 
room" was most likely opened, and neighljoring tarmers came 
in of evenings to converse with this son of learning. The house- 
wile was more spruce in her attire, and the children were "fixed 
up" for the occasion. Some of these masters were like watch- 
dogs, and from their corner no covert sneer escaped them. The 
hard school usage of many a boy and girl dated from dislike 
come of these transient tarryings. 

The summer school-mistresses, mostly farmers' daughters, 
seldom brought mucli learning to their tasks, but they were 
generally good-natured, and in favor with their scholars. Hard- 
worked mothers sent their younger children to them as freely 
as if they had been hired nurses, and the lower row of seats 
was always full of the druling, sleepy little things, with legs 
helplessly dangling. Patchwork and samplers were allowed in 
these schools, and curious pieces of their faded old needlework 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 203 

are still to be found in country farm-houses. The securing of 
the summer schools was oiten the cause of ill-feeling. Much 
canvassing was done, and committeemen were chosen with ref- 
erence to particular candidates, who went before them to be 
examined in arithmetic, grammar, geography, and writing. The 
school pay was meagre, but a large item then to the girl of 
simple tastes and habits. 

It was astonishing how much the glory of the summer de- 
pended, to the children, upon the nature of the mistress. All 
the sunshine they got in their school-hours seemed to pass 
through her ; and by her disposition, as much as by the book 
lessons she taught them, she did her work at moulding their 
characters. A cross mistress turned their sweet into bitter, and 
made the otherwise happy days long and wearisome. Tlie chil- 
dren took upon such their natural revenges. They brought her 
no flowers ; they lagged at their books, and withdrew from the 
aspect of the room much of its wild summer adornments. But 
this was only a transient suppression ; outside they were the 
same romping, riotous, nature-loving children. 

If you have forttmately been one of these school-children, you 
recall the features and accidents of my picture, — the low-roofed 
school-house ; its adjoining wood-shed, littered with chips ; the 
beaten play-ground ; the outlying field, full of buttercups ; the 
w^ayside, thick with thistle and mullein and hardback ; the over- 
hauiiino; trees, the fallen fruit of which was lawful plunder ; the 
near wood; the far-off mountains; the blue sky overhead; the 
sunlicrht ; the shadows ; the moving life of the scene. You see 



204 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



the traveller coming down the thread of a highway on the distant 
hill ; the farmer's daughter spreading her clothes to bleach in 
the orchard ; working-men and oxen in the fields ; the shimmer 
of the near stream. You hear the brook's l)abble and the hum 
of the insects ; the song of thirds and the drowsy undertone of 
nature. You see and feel it all, — the onward processes of life ; 
the unerring growth of the year ; the resistless tramp of time. 
Very much would you give to leap back for a day upon the old 
goal-ground, that you might lie upon the grass, a scholar and a 
dreamer, and again watch that narrow landscape, which grew into 
you with a fruitful minuteness, and which has been the stable 
groundwork of the best landscapes of your maturer life. 





point of all the country round it. 

Such was William Saylor's of Whitefield 

Corner. The long bench for loafers, and 

the feeding-troughs for horses in front of 

its door, were no less its sign than was the 

painted board, on which was inscribed in gilt 

letters the owner's name. Bench loafers were 

perennial. They were the lazzaroni of village 

life; as much its grotesque embellishment as 

gargoyles were of gothic architecture. Three 

of them are distinctly pictured in memory upon 

the outside wall of William Saylor's store, against which in 

summer thev used to sit and sun themselves, given to whittling 

and expectoration. Their intermittent talk was like the dull 

27 



206 NEW ENGLAND BYdONES. 

drone of bees. With sluggish curiosity tliey eyed the passing- 
traveller, and were somewhat stirred by the coming of the stage. 
Smoking blackened pipes with short stems, they occasionally 
exchana;ed what thev called "chaws of terbaccer;" and with a 
dialect of their own, were of the class which has been the 
source of the slang so often falsely given in story as a type of 
the prevailing speech of old-time New England. These loafers 
were rarely disabled by liquor, but were sj)oken of as "soaked;" 
and even when past this recognized boundary of sobriety, were 
generally harndess. Nor Avere they lacking in a certain instinct 
of civility. If a comely matron or prcttv lass alighted from 
her wagon before them, they Ibrebore comment ujion her charms 
until she was inside the store. When their bench had Ix^en 
usurped by their betters, they slouched across the wav t(j the 
cobbler's slio[) oi' the tavern. 

In liaying and haryest times, when the la/i<'st <_)f them were 
absorbed into adjacent fields, AVilliam Sayl()r himself would come 
out and sit on the liench, waiting tor such stray custom as dairy 
work 01' daily farm wants might bring to him. Nobody could 
seem less busv or more contented than he, basking in the sun- 
shine. In truth, he was both busv and anxious. Alert for cus- 
tomers, he was reckoning his profits and forecasting future trade. 
He had some re})utation for gallantry ; but what shopper was 
ever harmed bv his well-turned compliments ? His graciousness 
was the more commendal»le because nature had marred his })ro- 
portions l)y several deformities ; otherwise he would have been, 
people said, a handsome man. His love of g(jssip was pro- 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 207 

verbial. There was a Whitefield saying that what WilHam 
Savior did not know was " not worth knowing ;" also, that no 
talking could go on wdiere he was without his " putting in an 
oar." By the more worldly-wise he was called sharp at a bar- 
gain, but he was trusted by simple farmers' wives with credulitv. 
The earliest remembered errand of most Whitefield children 
was to his store. His profits came in by cents ; the abject in- 
dustry of a whole year bringing him but a few hundred dollars. 
Yet he was looked upon as " well-to-do," for he lived gener- 
ously in a large house, overhung by trees, and for years had 
been both postmaster and town-clerk. He was a tireless officer, 
ferreting out marginal writing upon newspapers, and exacting 
fines with relish. 

Becky, his wife, was one of the neatest housekeepers in White- 
field. Her shining floors were the terror of dirty bovs. Her 
garden, overlooked by the meeting-house, was a wonder and 
delight. Never were such double poppies and marigolds as it 
held ; never such red apples, such purple damsons, such fat 
currants and gooseberries ; and though its flowers jostled each 
other with odd varietv of color, thev were a a-reat delisrht to 
uncritical eyes. 

It had the name of being a stingy garden. Even windfalls 
by the roadside were begrudged the passer-by. That which was 
really its best fruit, however, could not be withheld, — that sense 
of beauty and luxury which went out from it into the hearts of 
tired women, who, in meeting-time, used to keep their eyes fixed 
upon its blossoms, while gratefully breathing its scents. As they 



208 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

sat swinging great palm-leaf fans, with a sort of rhytlmiic 
motion, their patient faces, softened by the day's ease and con- 
tentment, were picturesque, and, in a measure, beautiful. 

In a city, William Saylor, with his maimed body, would have 
been tossed about, an unknown waif, Ijy its all-devouring current. 
In the little village of Whitelield, bolstered up by kind neighbors, 
his executive force was projected upon the surface of its life, an 
important factor. He was the spry, bustling, curious, kindly, 
courteous, loquacious storekeeper, who taught fashions with con- 
fidence and flicility ; grasping, yet trusted ; oracular, but humble ; 
fallil)le, while on the whole well-meanino; ; full of harmless con- 
ceit ; unstinted in paying hospitality ; half admirable ; half 
grotesque. Peace to his ashes ! 

How many people, who are hidden away unnoticed in towns 
and cities, might, in the quiet of some country village, rise to 
a high individuality, and make a lasting impress on neighbor- 
hood life ! 

William Saylor always seemed to be hopping in and out his 
box of a counting-room, the walls of which were zigzagged with 
broad tape, stuck full of Ijills and letters. These were, for the 
most part, yellow with age ; and the uppermost ones, with 
faded labels, had served as roosts for generations of flies. This 
littered room was the very heart of the village. Each day the 
stage-driver flung into it his mail-bag, which linked retired 
people to the wider world ; and from it every night William 
Saylor carried in a small, leather-covered box, thickly studded 
with brass nails, the profits of his day's trade. How well I 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 209 

recall Moses, the stage-driver, as he dashes up, six in hand, with 
a loud " Whoa," almost flinging his leaders on their haunches ! 
Windows swarm with faces ; the loafers forget to puff at their 
pipes. Out flies a leather bag, caught by the postmaster half- 
way ; and in ' a twinkling back it comes, little lightened by loss 
of the Whitefield mail. A snap at the heads of the leaders ; a 
prancing ; a dash,— away flies the coach in a cloud of dust, and 
the loafers settle back to their pipes. Later, in the silent, de- 
serted street, William Saylor, holding tight his leathern box, 
spry as a cat despite his lameness, flits past closed houses to 
his home. 

The stage-driver's bustle, the trader's caution, the coming 
of the mail, were but ripples from the great far-off" tidal 
waves ; and yet these ripples marked the day quite as much 
for the village of Whitefield as did the tidal waves for populous 
towns. 

Over the store were two chambers, one of which was the office 
of an able, hot-headed lawyer, wdio had been heard through a 
hole in the floor threatenino; to kick an obstinate client down- 
stairs. AVilliam Saylor was suspected of keeping an ear open 
to this hole ; but secrets could go up as well as down, and though 
curious, he was discreet. Why it was never stopped can be no 
mystery to one country-born, who well remembers the tendency 
in rural life to drift with plans into the indefinite f^iture, — to 
''put off;" a dallying due much to lack of means for execution; 
more to an instinctive acquiescence with the sluggish tide of 
custom ; for thus one taketh his ease. 



210 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

In the other chamber were kept farming utensils and such 
things as would crowd the store below. It was curiously rugged, 
and without like domestic associations, had somehow the at- 
mosphere of a larm-hoase garret. It was humanized by a 
library of books, most of which had been in use for half a cen- 
tury. Long since mellowed, they had begun, many of them, 
to decay ; and not one of them was so fresh as to seem out 
of place in this spot given over to cobwebs and dust. 

The store-shelves rose from floor to ceiling, and were packed 
close with a medley of such things as the actual wants or mild 
vanities of a plain people might suggest. " Dry-goods" were 
arranged with some eye to effect. Red and blue and yellow 
fabrics made contrasting streaks, while various fancy articles 
dangled from thick-set hooks in partitions of shelves. Under 
the counters were odds and ends of traffic. Thence came cotton 
batting and "factory yarn," and woollen skeins spun by farmers' 
wives. 

A peculiar odor pervaded the place. Sometimes it was of 
molasses, sometimes of fish, and again of tea or coffee. There 
was always a iaint scent of snuff in the air. When the tra})- 
door of the cellar, in which were kept the butter and poi'k, 
taken in barter, was lifted, there came up a strong smell of 
New England rum. The spigot of the molasses hogshead in 
the back part of the store seemed to be always drizzling into 
a tin measure, which in summer made an excellent fly-trap. 
The molasses had then a yeasty trick of foaming, and was apt 
to sour. Once in a while it "sus-ared." 



THE COUNTBY STOB.E. 211 

The floor of that portion of the store given over to groceries 
beeanie in time thick coated and ahnost bh\ck. Save for its 
daily s])rinkling and sweeping, the place was perhaps never 
cleaned. Yet this gradual accumulation of grime was such a 
familiar feature of long-used, unpainted buildings of this sort. 
that I am not sure it would have been so well or gratefullv 
rememljered had it been robbed of its brown and coljwebbv 
encrusting. 

This all sounds homelv ; but vou mio;ht search in vain on 
city streets for the mellow, ])leasing aspect of an old-time coun- 
try store. Entered by a narrow door ; dindy hghted ; full of 
oddly-mixed commodities ; its unplastered ceiling black with 
smoke, and crossed by Ijeams hung thickly with quaint things ; 
rust and mildew lurking in corners and creeping along edges 
of shelves ; shop-worn webs, the better for mellowing ; fresh 
goods u]iheaving the older on the shelves, and easily traced 
in strata : the mvsterious maw '" under the counter :"' it was 
as I'ich and warm in tone as an old Persian prayer-rug, and 
the bai'baric flavor of its mingled odors was, strange to say, 
agreealjle. It needed no show-window, for the woman who ha<l 
once rested in its shade from the heat of the day never l:)roke 
away from its charm. How many people pleasantly rememl)er 
the calicoes of such stores, deep dyed in indigo bltie and I'cd : 
the bandanna handkerchiefs mottled with white ; the cotton 
thi'cad, knotted in "hanks" and exhaustinu,' the best rano;e of 
color ! 

These old-time countrv stores, driftwood for a time of the 



212 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

quickened current of isolated life, are nearly all gone. Their 
successors are garish and commonplace. 

Twice a year AVilliam Saylor went by stage to Boston and 
bought a new stock, the coming of which, and its tossing about 
in bales and boxes in front of his store, was a village event. Not 
many high-priced articles found their way to Whitefield through 
him, his trade being mostly with farmers' families. In a row 
of drawers, however, were kept an occasional piece of silk, and a 
few webs of lawn and lace. The lawn was of good quality, and 
from it, when her turn came, she who had never known gay attire 
was sure to have her last robe decorously fashioned by loving 
neighbors. From the lace were made caps worn by matrons past 
middle life, the borders of which were prettily wrought with 
floss. Such webs were apt to get what was called "shop-worn." 
Yellow streaks went into them and indelible creases ; positive 
tooth-marks of time. 

William Savior never abated his price because of these brands 
of long possession. He always assured women that they would 
''wash" or "wear out." Perhaps he had an artist's eye for 
the mellowing of his goods. How could he help loving that 
creamy tint, — that tint of perfection which creeps along its 
folds into meshes of old lace ; indeed, into all long-woven undyed 
fabrics ! 

Sometimes, in unaccustomed ways of trade, strange articles 
found place upon the storekeeper's shelves, and were readily 
bought by innocent villagers. There was often peculiar fitness 
to proposed uses in the things thus taken up ; isolation ever 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 213 

forced new styles into congruity, or at least into lack of an- 
tagonism, with that intense personality which was wont to pos- 
sess village people. Such portion of their attire as was meant 
to l)e ornamental became douljly so lor its rarity. 

All thrifty Whitefield women once carried beaded bags ; bright 
woven things, come down as heirlooms. Again poke bonnets 
appeared, made Irom a ribljed, pale-yellow, paper stuif, in imita- 
tion of leghorn, and called Navarino; a pretty head-gear when 
it had been skilfully cut and sewed together. 

Nothing could be homelier than the country wagon drawn 
up on a summer's afternoon in front of Savior's store. While 
the farmer slipped the blinders from his horse and dealt out 
oats or hay, the housewife }iulled from under the seat boxes 
and l;)undles, which the twain tugged u}) the store-steps with 
the laggard pace of hard workers. Before their barter had 
ended the horse had munched his oats, lapped ' his trough 
clean, and had begun to chew its wood. There were three of 
these troughs, much gnawed by cribbing horses. Trivial facts, 
yet chronicling to an observing eye a lite current which, under 
more dramatic conditions, would have seemed motionless and 
stagnant. 

The farmer and his wife stepped more lightly when they 
came out. Their bundles were smaller, and they had been 
enlivened Ijy the sight of store-goods. Ploughshares and hoes, 
unsullied by use, had delighted the man's eye, while the house- 
wife had feasted hers upon silks and muslins folded in the 
drawers. 

■'S 



214 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

There was something pathetic, almost sacred, in this aptitude 
to receive impressions from such simple sources. I have seen 
old-time Whitefield barterers, while handling with roughened 
fingers soft webs which rarely adorned other than village Ijridals 
or burials, seem as delighted by their touch as children are 
with toys. Then they pushed them away, took up the fruits 
of barter, and went home contented. 

The corner on a late autumn day was like a miniature fair ; 
then William Saylor had not a minute to spare from his twine and 
his yardstick. Incoming and outgoing wagons kept up a constant 
procession. Women pulled over his goods, and what they were 
too poor to buy they talked about with admiring neighbors. The 
men made their coarser purchases and lounged l:)y their horses, 
while a row of loafers smoked and gossipped on the bench outside. 
I dare say not one of them took note of the beautiful outlying 
scenery ; but they were none the less enframed and embellished 
by it. 

Winter always sent the loafers inside, where they exchanged 
their bench for wooden-bottomed chairs around a roaring stove. 
Horses scenting littered oats and hay would stop of their own 
accord before the troughs ; and a double row of them, shaggy 
with buffalo-robes, was often to be seen standing at the corner. 
With them came sleds full of wood, waiting for customers, and 
"regular teams" stopping for "bait." After Thanksgiving, before 
the roads began to drift, people were in the habit of going often 
to the corner. Their constant passing enlivened the highway ; 
and sound of bells was grateful in a silence otherwise so profound. 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 215 

Sucli silence always pervades in the open country a snow- 
covered landscape. In summer there is ever the drowsy under- 
tone of growing nature, but winter is rest, and rest of nature 
is silence. 

The still, moonlit, winter nights of Whitefield Corner were 
sublime. The high-perched little village, but a speck under 
the great arch of a glittering sky, with its wall of mountains, 
seemed sometimes nearer to the other world than this. The 
people and things I describe are pleasant, brown shadings of 
its white- winged memories. The apparent life of the villagers 
was restful and quiet ; underneath .was a strong still undertow. 
These simple-hearted people truly lay upon the bosom of nature. 
Hence came to them poetry and sentiment and a measure of 
sadness, resulting from undiverted companionship with her 
forces. They who floated, or were lightly tossed on the sur- 
face, were quiescent and happy. Only thpse who touched 
the undertow felt with pathetic, often tragic power, how small 
a relation their own little strand bore to the great ocean of 
life. 

William Saylor's store was more than a lounging-place in 
winter. It was an unorganized lyceum, fed by the classic library 
shut up with the ploughs and hoes in its chamber. There a 
wise blacksmith and a well-read carpenter held high dispute 
with the college-learned lawyers and doctors, while a row 
of eager listeners sat perched upon the counters. Several 
men were absolute winter fixtures of the place. Old Squire 
Saylor, William's father, night after night growled his approval 



216 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

or dissent from the self-same corner; and beside him, the "twin 
farmers" drifted into a serene old age. Most of his visitors 
were tireless whittlers, and kept Saylor well supplied wath 
kindlings. A goodly-sized monument might have been built 
to the best lawyer from the pine sticks which he had pointed, 
through force of habit, in his not too many leisure hours. Un- 
occupied composure is the outcome of polite society. These 
villagers were possessed of the demon of work ; and this whittling 
of the store loiterer was but the oozing through fingers' ends 
of ingrained force. 

Farmers liked to drive hither on moonlit nights, to hear 
what they called 'S:^ollege learning." They had a wav of say- 
ing to their " gudewives," " I guess after I've foddered the cattle 
and done up the chores I'll go to the corner." They talked 
there by themselves of stock and produce ; of sickness and mor- 
tality ; compared the girth of cattle ; made note of prices ; fore- 
stalled the weather ; praised the work of wives and daughters, 
and sometimes the latest sermon ; found little iault, and did 
little mischief by their chatter. A sudden coming in of the 
minister stopped all lighter talk, and turned the loafers into 
dummies. Shortly afterwards they carried to their homes a full 
news budget of harmless gossip. 

The knot of wise men seen by the light of an oil lamp through 
a small eastern window of William Saylor 's store made a quaint 
picture. Half of them were classically educated ; all good 
thinkers, to whom the loafers were no more than warts of 
fungus to crunks of old oaks. They abstained from liquor, which 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 



217 



was then a common beverage, because of the dying entreaty of 
one of their nnmber, with whom they had passed many jocund 
evenings over cards and wine. He warned them with awful 
emphasis, and notliing Ijetter ilkistrates their strength and in- 




tegrity of nature than the fact that at the first real ju'esenti- 
ment of danger they turned with the shar})ness of a right 
angle into ways of utter sobriety. 

The story of their reformation and its tragic cause was handed 
down with that distinct minuteness with which all village tradi- 
tions are preserved. Upon the dying man's own testimony he 



218 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

was given over to outer darkne.sH ; and children were told his 
last words as a. part of their moral training. So much does a 
single life stand out in the country ; no career is concealed, no 
death-bed curtained. iVll is open to the sun, which happily for 
many years after shone, in the little hamlet of Whitofield, on 
nothing so sad as this man's new-made grave. 

Save the periodical sprees of three chronic tipplers, liquor 
seldom disturbed the quiet of the village street. Stinginess, 
and their own cider, kept farmers from indulgence. The tem- 
perance lecture of the brilliant, dying comrade controlled some ; 
while others were restrained by that superior learning and con- 
sequent self-respect Avliich before the days of railroads marked 
the professional men of country villages ; such men as in Wil- 
liam Saylor's store made a village autocracy, and were the 
fountain-head of politics if not of morals. 

Before town-meetings, earnest voices might be heard through 
the closed door ; and through the little window was seen much 
gesticulation. Brawling was infrequent ; if, how^ever, dispute 
rose above high-water mark, it spread like a civil war. Once 
a harmful bit of gossip exuding from the store, set two families 
at swords'-points for a generation. A severe breach was hard 
to heal. These same people, who were ordinarily unswerving 
in paths of rectitude, were apt to be as obstinate as mules 
when they went wrong. 

As a rule the eager talkers were self-contained. Their most 
excited moods were easily calmed by stepping outside into the 
serene atmos|)here of the village street. There all was peace. 



THE COUNTRY STORE. 219 

Horses stamped the snow and jingled their bells ; the same moon 
and stars that looked down upon the splendor and traffic of great 
cities smiled on the quiet village of Whitefield Corner ; where 
women and children watching the night would say, " It can't 
be late, for there's a light in William Saylor's store." 

At nine o'clock Savior always shut his window blinds. Then 
the talkers and their listeners always went home. The horses 
were unhitched; the lamp put out, and almost before the store- 
keeper had withdrawn his door-key from its socket, women 
would begin to call out, '' It's bedtime, for William Saylor's 
is shut up." 

How many o? you have known such a store, into whose thresh- 
old and floor the stream of a bygone village life has worn its 
path ! It can never be repeated. The conditions of its existence 
are passed. Never again will the women of Whitefield innocently 
shape their own fashions. They are no longer shut in from the 
prying eyes of the outer world ; nor yet, alas ! from its pomps 
and vanities. A way has been opened for them into the very 
heart of the land. 

But where is the heart of the villa2;e ? Absorbed ; onlv the 
ghost of a memory haunting the ghost of a store ! Years ago, 
the lamp which sent out its beams through that little wimlow 
cheered a whole landscape, — a great Avhite landscape, high up ; 
shut in ; a calm retreat of untroubled nhnds. The snow and 
the silence remain, but the simplicity, culture, and comradeship, 
fostered by enforced isolation, are gone. 



'IE 







■-Wi. 



£f 



■■' OCUND country harvests ; blessed dying days of the 
te^^id"^ spent year, — how deKghtfal, seen IVoni an uphmd, 
was the exuberance of your tinished yegetation I 
Farms were like gardens, with patches of corn and later grain 
and cloyer and soft-tinted second grass. Orchards wei'e full ol 
apple-heaps; pumpkins and squashes dotted the fields; sumachs 
fiaunted by the roadside and outlined the walls; forests were 
afiame ; bushes kindled in field and pasture. The earth was 
aliye with workers. The life of eyery household seemed to haye 
poured itself out upon the landscape, to Avliich, beyond the l»right- 
ness given to it l:)y the deep-dyed colors of the perfected year, 
was added that afterglow of the summer, which marks the true 
harvest days. These days are the richest of the year, for they 
hold its dying, its life, and its resurrection. They are full of its 
miracles. The incoming season is pushing out the old ; and the 
husks which are thrust out in the process, the stubble of the 

29 221 



222 WEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

cornfields, the withered vines and weeds, the things that have 
been blighted by frost, or sapped by the fruits which they have 
borne, lie thick on the brown earth. The refuse of the outgone 
life and its incoming fruits are fused together in a sort of mel- 
lowed glory, — a final and transient burst of brightness from the 
spent season, which is giving back to the farmer tenfold for his 
labors. 

To one driving at night through the country, what can surpass 
its beauty, the offspring of its devastation? Over all, fair and 
solemn and stately, watches the harvest moon. There is a gray 
glitter to everything. Objects bristle in the clear, cold air. 
Shadows beset wood and highway, and lie upon rock and hillock 
and field and pasture. Shadows lurk in corners, stalk before and 
stretch out Ijehind. The whole landscape takes life. Trees and 
fences seem to move, and far-away objects play pranks with your 
horse. Every sound is crisp in this night air. The frisking of 
your little dog through the wayside bushes snaps their twigs like 
the click of pistols. Anything stirring in the wood, or out of it, 
sends an echo flying over the resonant fields. Farm-houses and 
barns are brio-ht with harvest lishts. Distance and moonliQ;ht 
lend charm to mild festivities, and girls, seen from the highway, 
move and work amongst their sheaves with a classic grace. If 
the doors of the barns are shut, then from cracks and crevices 
and gable-windows streams the ruddy light, and merry as bells 
burst out the singing voices of young men and maidens. Their 
songs are mostly quaint ballads, swelling full upon the night air. 

One of these old barns was an attractive place, with its ceiling 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 



223 



lofty and cobwebbed, its gable-windows far up and dusty and dim, 
its walls flanked on either side by solid mows of sweet-smelling 
hay, which clung to the boards and beams way up to the rafters. 
It Avas full of the odor of the dried ferns and flowers that had 
been entano-led and cut down with the o;rasses ; and ladders and 




working-tools, leannig aganist its mows, blended in beauty with 
its many-shaded browns, as did every senseless thing and dumb 
beast and living man within its walls. 

Behold an ancient husking-party, — merry gathering. The 
Ijarn is dimly lighted by candles in tin lanthorns, hung high on 
pegs. The homely structure suffers a night-change into a lofty 



224 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

hall, with arches and stained roof and fretted beams. A new life 
seems to be born into the withered grass. It clings to and twines 
about the jagged wood with a fantastic carving. A whole year 
has gone into the mixing of the colors of this picture, in the 
shadows of which sit the buskers of the corn harvest. The 
Ijrawnv arms of young men and the i)lump arms of maidens 
keep time to their music. Some are breaking the ears from 
the stalk ; others are stripping the husks from the ear, lightening 
their tasks with the babble of flying tongues. Stout men bear 
brimful baskets of golden ears to the granary ; heaps of cast-off 
stacks are made compact ; crisp white husks pile up against the 
shoulders of the girls and fly about their ears ; cheeks grow red 
and eyes brighten ; spirits rise ; jokes are cracked ; pranks 
played ; and many a flirtation plied with unconscious grace. 
The end comes at length, the last basket is sent out, the husk- 
ing is over. The thrifty farmer, who has slyly put back his 
clock and delayed his supper, blows a horn, and just as the Ian- 
thorns begin perhaps to wane, out fi'om the barn burst the rustic 
merrymakers, eager for the harmless festivities of farm-house 
parlor and kitchen. 

The supper is abundant, homely, and wholesome, and the 
buskers, with appetites sharpened by labor, partake heartily of 
it. The hardy workers keep no late hours, and midnight finds 
the farm-house silent and deserted, whilst groups of merry youths 
send their chatter and laughter echoing back from lane and field. 

On the morrow the host will go out early to inspect his granary, 
and make right any careless assorting of ears. The stalks Avill 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 225 

be stowed away on highest mow for future feed. If kindly 
disposed, he will leave the ragged butts to be picked over by 
careful housewives. How forlorn these women looked, with 
shawls pinned over their heads, rummaging for white husks ; 
intent, silent, plying their task with Ijare and sinewy arms, their 
wrinkled, careworn faces tanned by exposure, it was hard to think 
of them as having once been rosy, laughing girls, handsome 
helpers at bygone huskings. They tramped along the highway 
with crowded baskets and bundles, satisfied, and unconscious 
that in thus taking up the fag-end of the harvest they were 
only gray workers and bearers of burdens. Their husks made 
sweet beds, and the mats they plaited were serviceable and 
cleanly. 

Busy^ prudent, working woman ! the same thrift which has 
spread her joints and hardened her face has also helped to build 
her comfortable home. Here are the shining pans on the bench 
beside her; the kitchen-garden, just beyond, alive with bees; 
the water-barrel, half buried in sunflowers ; the plantains and 
burdocks ; the wood-pile, tossed about, with axe and chopping- 
block near it, — all incidents of a pleasant picture, for this is 
the back-door of a farm-house, and this woman the simple house- 
wife, whose walk in life is with these homely things. 

She was plump and fair and rosy-cheeked once. In childhood 
she roamed the fields and pastures, and went to the village school. 
As she grew older she had much heart in rustic merriment. She 
showed taste in dress and a love for flowers. A natural grace 
was born in her. Something called gentility came to her, so that 



226 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the garments she wore fitted and became her. She had her Kttle 
romance, begun and ended at an apple-bee or husking. Dressed 
in her prettiest frock, with a bright ribbon at her throat, she was 
then most unhke this hard-faced woman standing by her door. 
Here she is a background to part of her belongings. She has 
burnished the pans, and weeded the garden, and dipped water 
from the barrel day after day. Suns have risen and set, years 
have begun and ended, and the wearisome cares have also come 
round in never-varying procession, until she has gotten to be 
what you now see her, a patient, faded worker, — the spinner 
and weaver and purveyor of a household. 

These hand-maidens of nature, isolated from art, unconsciously 
expressed much beauty in their humble wares. The webs they 
wove were unadulterated, pliant, and lustrous ; their dyes, drawn 
from homely weeds, were rich and tenacious ; their polished 
bowls, scooped out from knotted wood, were prettier than any 
silver plate ; their flax-wheels were stringed instruments ; and 
many things of their daily handling were elegant for shape or 
color. 

Who has ever seen a more pleasing sitting-room than that of 
many an old-fashioned country-house, with its deep-toned home- 
spun carpet, its dark mahogany, its tall clock in the corner, its 
narrow mantel, high up, filled with sea-shells and a stray vase 
or two ; its low walls ; its windows shaded by lilacs and over- 
hanging elms ? The brass knobs on drawers and doors, and in 
chimney-corners, were pleasant spots of lirightness. The brass- 
tipped, lion-clawed table-legs were the best-made things of their 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 



227 



kind. The clock in the corner, with its quaint machinery, its 
involved registering, and its loud ticking, was the unlying chroni- 
cler which was to last long after the family died, — a thing beauti- 
ful for the richness of its material and the stately expression of 
its form. A soft brown pervaded the room, which was brightened 
through its windows by more perfect landscapes than could be 
bought for money, perfumed by scents which 
no art could bind up for sale. The 
curtains and carpets, the 



'•?" ■'»«" 




threads of which were 
dyed with barks and 
weeds, had the wild 
color of things which 
had grown in fields 
and woods. 
__,,„.- - — Farm-houses were busy 
as bee-hives in autumn with 
the peculiar work of the season. 
Their sunny sides were hung with strings 
of sliced apples and pumpkins ; yards were littered with barrels 
and casks and loaded carts ; sheds were crammed with the out- 
pouring of the year. The women were eagerly taking up the 
loose-lying threads of their work, chopping, pickling, preserving, 
assorting their butter and cheese for the market, setting their 
dyes, and making their woollen webs into garments. 

When the harvests had been gathered in, the mellow flavor 
of them seemed to pervade the whole house ; and there was not 



228 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

a room which was not in some way graced by the products of the 
past year. The garret was crammed, and the kitchen beams were 
hung thick with earth-grown things : strings of bright |)eppers, 
bunches of herbs, long-necked squashes, braided seed-corn, and 
much else precious to the farmer, — summer forage of his fields. 
The most valued gifts of his farm were kept here, in sight and 
out of reach, — the sacred seedlings of the coming year. The 
cellar beneath was full of the fatness of the past season. From 
its bins came the odor of many field crops ; out of casks and 
Ijarrels the scent of the year's vintage. 

The farmer is planted in his chimney-corner. His year's work 
is over, his harvest is gathered in. Asleep by his hearth-stone, 
with the ruddy firelight dancing over him, he is a picture of 
calm content, — an lionest man, with few wants, enriched bv 
nature, and so made hapjjy by her. His room is also fire-gilded 
into a place of rare delight. The fruits which he has by hard 
labor wrought out of the earth's bosom, strung over and around 
him, cling like carved things to the beams and walls; so that, 
without knowing it, this homely man sits, a life study, bv his 
own hearth-stone. 

AVitli the ending of the harvest peace seemed to fall upon the 
farm-houses ; they were filled with the glow of blazing fires and 
the inturning of the out-of-doors life. It was a simple, sweet 
life. Memories of winter evenings spent at my grandfather's 
come l;)ack to me. They bring to me the glory of age, the 
simplest forms of domestic life, and the beauty of winter land- 
scapes. They give to me a perfect fireside picture in a quaintly- 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 



229 



furnished room, in the chimney-corner of which sits an old man 
with flowing white hair, a beautiful old man. Outside, to the 
far-away horizon, stretches the undulating, snow-covered land- 
scape, on which, in gray outline upon a white ground, one sees 
many beautiful things which were hidden by the verdure of 
summer ; many shapes which have been revealed by the dying 
of leaves and grass. Skeleton trees and bushes and naked 
woods seem to be thrust out in aerial mezzotint — soft, gray, and 
shadowy. The piercing firelight streams through the windows, 
and stretches out and joins hands with the moonbeams, and goes 
dancing over field and pasture, even to the far-off" hills. 





WINTER PLEASURES. 



How utterly transforming to the country is the first positive 
snow-fall of winter ! It is a thing of life ; it clings and hangs 
everywhere. Its great, fluffy ridges and folds put out of sight 
fences and rocks and hillocks and highways, and bleach the gray 



WINTER PLEASURES. 231 

surface of the landscape into a dazzling whiteness. Under this 
new veneering the most untidy farm-houses are beautiful, and 
the worst-tilled fields as good as the best. Waking up into such 
a change some winter morning is like going into a new world. 
It is coming out from the gray mourning of the almost dead year 
into a sublime white silence. 

Every country-born person can recall such greeting of an 
early snow, to meet which he has gone forth with elastic step 
and heart. Slowly and picturesquely motion is thrust upon the 
scene. Walkers, scuffling through the light snow, trail slender 
paths along ; smoke coils from chimneys ; cattle are let into the 
sunny barnyards ; life spills out from the farm-houses ; troughs 
are chopped free from ice ; men begin to hack at the wood-piles 
and draw water from the wells ; teams are harnessed ; children 
start for school, — the new landscape is alive with workers, thrust 
out with startling distinctness from its snow background. 

Directly oif from roofs and fences and rocks and higher hil- 
locks, with the sun's march, slips this snow covering, and ti'om 
the beautiful, evanescent picture arises another, with added 
warmth and life and color. To one drivina; through a tbrest 
at such a time it is as if fairies had been at work and laden 
its minutest twigs with a rare white burden. Snow-clad old 
wood, through which I passed years ago on my way to my 
grandfather's farm, you are as lovely in memory as you were 
in reality then. It is early morning. The air seems to crackle 
with the magic of frostwork. Fleecy fringes are falling from 
the overburdened branches and fling over me great, foam-like 



232 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

flakes ; the horses' hoofs sink deep and noiselessly. Footprints 
of wild animals are thick in the wood, and all along the way- 
side are tracks of squirrels, rabl_)its, and such harmless things. 
Loaded teams grow frequent and sleighs fly past. The sound 
of bells is crisp and loud. Betsy pricks up her ears and flings 
out a spray-like cloud on either side. The little dog following 
after shoots over the wall, bounding neck deep into the unljroken 
snow, sniffs at the tiny footmarks of game, plunges into the wood, 
and I hear him barking shortly after far ahead. Twigs begin to 
snap. There is a crackle through the wood, the sun is climljing 
up, the snow is melting, and falling from the trees sinks with a 
fluffy sound into the cooler bed below. Sharp and distinct is the 
voice of this dissolving })anorama. As the sun gets power the 
snow garment shrinks, and all of a sudden it glides off from the 
grim old wood. 

Often a mist or rain, coming upon the newly-fallen snow, 
crvstallizes it into solid shapes, and the sun gives to this f];ost- 
work a bewildering beautv. Nothing could surpass my old wood 
thus clad. It was a sublime, many-arched, crystal cathedral, 
outlined with flashing brightness. AVliat a transient thing it 
was ! As quickly as the sun gilded it, just so quickly did it 
demolish it. Glittering pillar and frieze and cornice suddenly 
disintegrated, and under the gray, naked, old trees thick-strewn 
twigs and fast-melting icicles were all that was left of this palace 
of carved ice. 

How short the winter days used to seem ! how clear-cut they 
were bv snow and cold and la(dv of growino- life ! What winters 



WINTER PLEASURES. 233 

those were of forty years ago, when snow-drifts blotted out the 
features of a landscape and levelled the country into a monoto- 
nous white plain ; when people woke in the morning to find their 
windows blocked up, and the chief labor of months was to keep 
their roads open ! 

Much joy the young people got out of these same snow-drifts. 
The crusts which hid the fences gave them ample coasting-fields, 
and they burrowed like rabbits in the drifts. I remember a 
village, beloved by Boreas, which was beset by mimic Laplanders, 
who used to call out to surprised travellers from their caves in 
the piled-up wayside. In this same village the adventurous boy 
used to shoot over highway and fence, across fields, past a frozen 
brook, up to the edge of a forest a mile off. His small craft 
was liable to strand by the way, and lucky was he if he did not 
bring up against the jagged bark of some outstanding tree. His 
sled was home-made, of good wood, mortised and pinned together, 
and shod with supple withes, which with use took a polish like 
glass, and had seldom to be renewed. 

Boys and girls slid and coasted through their childhood, and 
this keen challenge of the north winds, this flinging of muscle 
against the rude forces of winter, shaped and strengthened 
them for after-labor. They glided along the highway, over the 
ruts made by iron-shod wood-sleds ; they guttered the snow-drifts 
with tracks ; and wherever the rain had settled and frozen in 
the fields or by the wayside, they cleared and cut up the ponds 
with their swift flying feet. Ploughing knee-deep through freshly- 
fallen snows to the village school, roughly clad, rosy-cheeked, 



234 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

joyous, they eagerly beset passing sleds and sleighs, hanging 
to stakes and clinging to runners, from which they tumbled into 
the school-house entry, stamping it full of snow. The girls were 
not a whit behind the boys in their clamor and agility. They 
slid down the steep snow-banks and up and down the ice-paths, 
swift and fearless, and burst into the school-room almost as 
riotously as the boys. 

Tea-drinkings were the usual social diversions of the farm- 
house winter life. They were prim occasions, on which the best 
china, linen, and silver were brought out. Pound-cake and pies 
and cheese and doughnuts and cold meats were set forth, and 
guests partook of them with appetites sharpened by the rarity 
of the occasion. Neighbors from miles away were liable, on any 
winter's evenings to drive into my grandfather's yard for a social 
cup of tea. The women took off their wraps, smoothed their 
cap-borders, and planted themselves, knitting-work in hand, be- 
fore the hearth in the best room. The men put up their horses, 
and coming back, they stamped their feet furiously in the entry, 
and blustered into the sitting-room, filling it with frosty night-air. 
They talked of the weather, of the condition of their stock, of 
how the past year's crops held out, and told their plans for the 
coming year. The women gossiped of town affairs, the minister, 
the storekeeper's latest purchase, of their dairies, and webs, and 
linens, and wools, keeping time with flying fingers to the tales 
they told. The unconscious old clock in the corner kept ticking 
away the while, and Hannah, in the next room, set in order the 
repast, to which they did ample justice, growing more garrulous 



WINTER PLEASURES. 



235 



when inspired by the fine flavor of hospitality. They came and 
also went away early. When the outer door and big gate had 
closed after them, there had also gone out with them all extra 
movement and bustle from the household. Every spoon and fork 




and plate was already in its place, the remnants of the feast had 
disappeared, and the family was ready to take up on the morrow 
the slackened thread of its working ways. 

The leave-takings of these ancient hosts and guests were simple 
and beautiful. They shook hands and passed salutations and 



236 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

good wishes with as much gravity as if they had been going 
to some far hind ; and the pleasure which the visitors avowed 
in the .graciousness shown them was heartfelt. Merrily jingled 
their bells from out the farm-yard into the highway, and softly 
dying out with distance, the sound came back from the far-off 
hills in pleasant echo. 

Tender, true hospitality, simple customs, rare entertainments, 
you left no sting, no weariness behind you. You gave and im- 
poverished not. You were ungilded but dignified and decorous, 
healthful and pleasure-giving. If you were plain, you were not 
inelegant, for your silver was pure, your china quaint ajid costly, 
your linens were fine-twined, your viands were well cooked and 
wholesome. You were simply served to simple guests, but not 
without etiquette and the essence of style. The host carved with 
dexterity, and the hostess, in her busy passes, was instinctivelv 
observant of the tastes and needs of her guests. That which 
garments lacked in material and make, the raddv firelio'ht im- 
parted to them, painting these robust farmers and matrons into 
rarely-costumed pictures. A¥hat of high culture was wanting to 
their speech, was given to it by the sweet piety and purity of it. 
They talked of what made up their daily lives, and that was the 
yearly marvels and glories of ever-dying, ever-renewing nature. 
The men, discoursing of winds and rains and cattle and grasses 
and trees and gi'ains, stumbled upon many truths of high 
philosophy ; and, reviewing with earnest faith the sermons of the 
Sabbath-day, showed themselves well grounded in all gospel 
doctrine. The women, innocently })rattling of the webs they 



WINTER PLEASURES. 237 

wove, drawing in and out the threads of much discourse, mixed 
with it many a fine-spun sentiment, and the golden overshot of 
the few but keenly relished diversions of their serious lives. The 
serving-maid and serving-man listening to them, and catching 
the glow of the firelight past them, went into the background 
of the picture, to be quaint creatures of remembered scenes. 
They themselves, observant and reverent of their elders, felt 
the sweets of hospitality in their own hearts ; and in ministering 
generously unto others were themselves being ministered unto. 

The winter lull of vegetation was often spent by my grand- 
mother and Hannah in the spinning and dyeing and weaving 
of woollen fabrics, to be afterwards fashioned into quilts. The 
most esteemed of these were made of glossy, dark flannel, lined 
with 3^ellow, with a slight wadding of carded wool. For such 
a quilt the best fleece was set aside, and many dyes steeped in 
the chimney-corner. Fastened to a frame, it was in summer 
the fine needle-work of the house. Neighbors invited to tea 
helped to prick into it, stitch by stitch, the shapes of flowers and 
leaves. They came early and bent over it with grim zeal, helped 
on by the gradual showing of the pattern. They loved to take 
out the pins and roll up the thing, counting its coils with delight. 
The quilting of it was hard work, but the women called this rest, 
and were made happy by such simple variation of labor. They 
kept up their harmless babble until sundown, when one, more 
anxious than the rest, catching sight of a returning herd, would 
exclaim, " The cows are coming, and I must go." Shortly they 
might all be seen hurrying hither and thither through green 

31 



238 WIJW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

lanes, back to the cares which they had for a few hours 
shifted. 

The finishing of this quilt made a gala day for the neighbor- 
hood. It was unrolled and cut out with much excitement. 
When Hannah took it to the porch-door to shake it out, the 
women all followed her, clutching its edges, remarking upon 
the plumpness of the stitched leaves, and the fineness of its 
texture. It was truly a beautiful thing, for it was a growth of 
the farm, — an expression of the life of its occupants, a fit cov- 
ering for those who made it. 

The winter diversions of the young people were just as simple 
as those of their elders. What could be quainter than the 
singing-school, held in a country school-house, with its rows of 
tallow candles planted along the desks, and its loud-voiced master 
pitching his tunes? The young men sat on one side and the 
maidens on the other. Its wild music was heard far away. The 
tunes sung were of long repute, and what was wanting in melody 
and harmony was made up by the zeal with which they were 
roared out. To many of the singers the walk home was the best 
of all, when, in undertone, they lengthened out the melodies 
which had been taught them. 

Apple-bees and spelling-matches sometimes brought together 
the fathers and mothers of the district, as well as their sons and 
daughters. The former were apt to mean frolics, which carried 
more confusion than profit into a farmer's kitchen. The latter 
were the occasions of much healthy merriment. 

After all, the true zest to these diversions was given to them 



WINTER PLEASURES. 239 

by the bright moonlight, which generally brought them to pass. 
It was a welcome comer, and turned the introverted evening life 
of the farm-houses out into illuminated lanes and highways. 
Solemn highways on gray winter evenings ; one got easily be- 
wildered in them and thrown olT from his track. Objects loomed 
up out of the snow, and harmless things took strange shapes and 
looked ghostly in distance and whiteness. Horses were apt to 
shy, runners bounced with a sharp click upon the uneven path, 
and bells rang sharply in the clear, cold air. Merry, merry 
bells, telling of coming and departing guests, — the one jocund 
voice of winter, putting the traveller in heart, making glad the 
listening ear, ringing right joyously into farm lane and yard, — 
who does not welcome with delight the old-time jingle? The 
sound of country bells, struck out by the slow, measured pace 
of farm-horses, was of prolonged measure. It was deep, too, 
because the bells were made large and of good metal. The 
peculiar sound of each farmer's bells became as much his per- 
sonal possession as his own voice, and they were quite sure to 
last his lifetime. As much as the w^nds the bells gave voice 
to the season. It was joyous mostly, yet with a wild pathos in 
its music when dying out in tortuous country ways, with that 
sad indistinctness of any sound which has wellnigh passed into 
silence. 

Akin to the bells for sweetness of expression were the farm- 
house lights, starring the landscape and telling the traveller of 
peaceful indoor life. Driving through the country, silent with 
the rest of winter, one cannot overestimate the companionship 



240 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and friendliness of the lighted windows of outlying habitations. 
The breaking of a farm-light upon your sight is like the grasp 
of a living hand, and with it comes out to you the peace of fire- 
sides ; by it, unawares, people send forth to you the warm glow 
of hospitality. An unlighted house in the sparsely-settled coun- 
try is most forlorn. It is a body without a soul, — a thing which 
ought to be alive and is not. 

In the simplicity of ancient country life the homespun curtains 
were seldom let down at eventide. The farm-houses were mostly 
the length of a lane from the roadside, and so the pictures of their 
indoor life were sent out from their small windows through a 
softened perspective. What could be better than the white- 
headed old man dozing in one chimney-corner ; the dear old 
o-randmother noddino; in the other ; the middle-aQ;ed son and 
daughter resting over light work ; the back-log, getting ready 
for its raking up ; the walls, hung with tokens of sleeping child- 
life, such as slates, caps, and comforters, — homely things, catching 
the light of dying embers ! 

How bright the winter sunsets were, how clear and starlit the 
nights, how bracing and electric the air, how much more gen- 
erous than harsh was that climate which, while it blotted out 
vegetation, at the same time spread over the landscape a great 
spectacular glory ! 

Shut in by frostwork from sight of the out-of-doors world, 
have you never, when a child, breathed upon an icy pane ; and, 
through the loophole thus made, caught a condensed view of the 
glories of a winter's day ? 



WINTER PLEASURES. 241 

Picturesque upon snow were the most common movements of 

» 

farm-life. Men, chopping logs, seemed more like players than 
workers. With what steady swing their axes rose and fell ! 
how these glittered in the sunshine ! The chips that flew freely 
about, tilted at all angles, how fresh they were, with their pret- 
tily-marked lines of yearly growth, their shaggy bark, and their 
scent of sap ! The sound of the axe was resonant and cheery. 




putting life into a farm-yard. It echoed still more pleasantly 
from a woodland, whence it came with a muffled indistinctness, 
like a regular pulse-beat of labor. The choppers seemed never 
to tire ; only they stopped now and then to brandish their stiff- 
ened arms, and gaze at their growing piles with thrifty pride. 
They wore mittens of blue and white, striped, or knit in a curious 
puttern, called " chariot wheels," by the housewives. Many of 
them had leathern patches upon thumb and palm. 

How contentedly the cattle stood chewing their cuds and 



242 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

blinking their eyes ; looking askance at the long icicles which 
hung from eaves of barns, and trickled drops upon their backs ! 
Women came out with baskets and buckets for wood and water ; 
and, in the silent attitude of labor, paused for a moment and 
basked in the sunshine. Wood-laden sleds dragged along the 
highway, with boys and girls clinging to their stakes ; and the 
teamsters' shouts to " Broad" and " Brio-ht," mingled with the 
chatter and laughter of boys and girls. Boots lazily drying, 
smoked in the sunshine ; and you heard the weather-wise farmer 
saying to his neighbor, " It thaws in the sun to-day." 

Beautiful Avas the heavily coiling smoke in the crisp, morning 
air. How deliciously its opaque whiteness was piled against a 
background of sky ! What a charming aerial welcome it was 
from the morning life of the farm-house ! 

Beautiful was the fantastic piling of storm-clouds, forerunners 
of winds ; and beautiful were the rugged drifts made by flying 
snows. 

Hush I— I am young again. The homely scenes have all come 
back, — the old workers into their old ways and places, and the 
earth they deal with wraps them about with its splendor. Snow 
King, grand old master, variously carving out the features of a 
winter landscape, I salute you ! 

Dear dwellers in that old-fashioned home, I salute yon also ! 
You seem to me in memory as stately and as beautiful as one of 
the tall oaks of your own possessions. Nature was your god- 
mother. She led you in childhood through her fields and pas- 
tures and woodlands. She distilled for you the best balsams of 



WINTER PLEASURES. 



243 



her trees and shrubs. You unwittingly quaffed them as you went 
with her, and they gave you health and strength and lease of a 
long life. They inoculated you with a taste for pure pleasures. 
Your frames, your manners, your desires, your whole life, had 
a flavor of the land that bare you. You were the true out- 
growth, the real aborigines, the rightful, harmonious, delightful 
denizens of the soil, you long-dead, but never-to-be-forgotten 
dwellers in mv grandfather's home ! 




